As a child, I loved to chase the Shadow because my Dad taught me that it is a pointer to a presence. Some years later, I had an epiphany which led to a critical encounter with the Shadow in the Desert in 2019. Since then, I have observed the shadow appearances on various surfaces within different timelines, under multiple conditions and projections, to understand its characteristics and evaluate its usability as a theme for a painting project. As I continued with the enquiry, I came across Iwona Blazwick’s interview with  Antony Gromley, in which he stated that ‘the body should be treated like a space’. My initial concern was finding a meaningful way to respond to the Shadow sensibly. However, to a certain extent, Gromley’s assertion aligns with the uli’s visual expression of lines and the curves navigating the space, the dark shaded areas that are sensible to the environment and a projected image that conforms to such sensibility. Since the Shadow is a space on its own, the next question was, what do I do with the space? I wanted my Painting of the shadow image to have a symbolic relationship with the subject. Therefore, I interrogate the Shadow from my ethno-aesthetic experience by introducing the Igbo cultural and artistic elements. I meet Krydz Ikwuemese, a professor and head of art school at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, through a friend. He has extensively researched uli and spearheaded the preservation of uli art for over two decades. He lectured me on the historical context of uli as an ancient Igbo art, then invited me to an exhibition, Forward to the Past, in Brunei Gallery, SOAS London, in 2022. The Exhibition future the works of UNN Alumni who have championed uli revival for decades. Further research led me to Re Entanglements by Paul Basu. The Exhibition sought to re-engage with Colonial Archives in the Decolonial Time.

The documents and images from this Exhibition were mostly from Northcott W Thomas’s anthropological report of the Ibo-speaking people of Nigeria. However, Paul Basu’s work seeks to connect the archives with the descendants of those images. In contrast, I thought about the moments that got cut out of the archives due to the imperialist operation of the camera, which Ariella Azoulay referred to as the ‘shutter moment’. She posited that ‘it commands what sorts of things have to distanced, bracketed, removed, forgotten, suppressed, ignored, overcome and made irrelevant’. At that point, I decided to use the shadow images to index the images cut out by the archive. Most importantly, it will unfreeze uli from primitivism to modernity by adopting the shadow image as the physical representation of the metaphysical.

The research aims to create a rich dialogue between traditional Igbo beliefs and contemporary art practices, contributing to broader discourses on presence, absence, and duality in existence. It is a beautiful fusion of cultural heritage, artistic innovation, and philosophical inquiry.