I Ate My Friends, Precious Opara
Precious Opara is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, creative and art director currently working at Nataal magazine. This personal project for TSUKI is a series of paintings titled I Ate My Friends. Precious then used prints of this work to make a collection of long sleeve tees, which are available for purchase here.
Precious chatted to TSUKI over email about her new contribution, how it reflects her feelings and psychology in 2020, and how her recent research projects have formed and reinforced her personal and professional work.
“I think my work in response to the research project is ultimately saying that Black artists do explore so many different topics in the work that they create, and that they shouldn't just be called upon when platforms need someone to front a story or campaign that particularly pertains to Blackness.”
TSUKI: First of all, how are you? Where are you? London, yes?
PRECIOUS OPARA: I'm doing good! I'm still in London, working and doing my best to make sense of my life this year. I've really gotten into making daily lists to order my life this year, and it's gotten to the point that during lockdown I repurposed my wardrobe doors as a whiteboard to jot down my tasks, ideas and any other aspirations I couldn't afford to keep taking up space in my head.
It seems like some of the visual and psychological ideas for “I Ate My Friends” came out of the isolation and alienation of being in quarantine? Did painting it remedy some of those feelings, or worsen them?
I would love to say that it helped remedy them, but then I'd be lying. Painting about it just allowed to me create more space in my head for other things, I still missed my friends but I had to "parent" myself and tell myself that I'm not the only one experiencing this, and that I will see them again... eventually. I think I create not for therapy, but for relief from cramming my brain and heart with such thoughts that have nowhere to go. Physicalizing my feelings into my work is like moving storage. I think the parts of this project that did help to remedy these feelings was my friends initial willingness to let me paint their eyes—no questions—and then their reactions to the paintings. It's been a long while since I've painted this much, so I was feeling nervous about putting it out. But I did, and I didn't die, so that's great!
Where does this painting fit in with the rest of your work? There are elements of collage in your photography, and this painting borrows from that technique a little bit. Your bio on your website states your work is concerned with the body, psyche, and surrealism—and this painting touches on all of this. I guess I’ve answered my own question? Perhaps there’s more you’d like to add though? How does collage play a role in your work? I’m aware that this painting doesn’t use collage in the strict cut-and-paste sense—more in a surrealist sense of absorption, consumption, inner and outer psychological states colliding, etc.)
Well, I think this painting definitely comes back to surrealism and my obsession with messing with the human form. Often with my use of collage, I like to use it to create a sense of multiple places existing simultaneously in the same image. The cuts are like rips in time to me and I can manipulate and duplicate anything I want so that whatever it is I'm trying to convey exists together all at once in the final image. I find it quite fun to play around with it, it's like a puzzle that I have created pieces for without knowing the end result—until I place a piece and then I just know.
“Our range of expression and interests are not limited to only expressing the pain of living in a world that hates us so much.”
I’m interested in some of your research projects as well, specifically the one on your website about how art by Black/BAME/BIPOC artists undergoes an “automatic politicization” under neoliberal paradigms. How does your work (if it indeed does) seek to navigate this, or undo this, or simply be in conversation with these ideas, learnings, and research? And what techniques do you use, if any, in your visual work, to this end? (By the way, I think this line of thinking and critique is more “relevant” and interesting than ever in 2020. By which I mean it’s being thought about in a more widespread and public way, and so these critiques you’re exploring are as prescient as they are necessary.)
I started this research as part of my final project at university and it felt great to have this dialogue with so many different Black creatives about the current climate. I think for me and many of them also, we reserve the right to explore different topics in our work should they be about Black radical politics or more personal topic... anything at all. I think my work in response to the research project is ultimately saying that Black artists do explore so many different topics in the work that they create, and that they shouldn't just be called upon when platforms need someone to front a story or campaign that particularly pertains to Blackness. As Veronica (V. Amon) rightly said, when everyone automatically politicizes the work made by Black creatives it misses the “chance to unpick what it means to be just people.”
Unless it's for a commission, I don't hold myself to create work solely out of a sense of political responsibility, but more out of personal expression. I care so much about the humanity of Black people and it was stressing me, seeing how many young Black creatives I knew that explored so many different subjects in their work, yet we all know there's a game to play to get your work noticed by neoliberal platforms that rule our industry. Our range of expression and interests are not limited to only expressing the pain of living in a world that hates us so much.
However, I've been thinking about this issue a lot more lately and I must clarify that I'm not criticizing Black artists that do create only political work out of a sense of responsibility to our community, I think there's room and validity for both. At this point there's no excuse for platforms not to broaden the subject scope coming from Black artists; I come across wonderful and varied work every day.
I did end up hypothesizing a virtual showcase that sought to remedy this issue, playing with optics/perceptions on what a Black artist looks like. The final project ended up being rather traumatic due to the stress, but I definitely want to come back to it and hopefully realize it.
Finally, what made you want to put it on a shirt?
I'm very into my personal style, I love graphics tees but tend to be quite picky about them, so it just made sense to put imagery that I like on a tee. That's another uniquely "me" piece added to my wardrobe. I originally was just going to print one for myself on an old t-shirt that I had at home, but then thought it would be nice to share with the people involved in the painting. It’s also a good way of getting my art out there a bit more. If you copped a tee and somebody asks you about it, thank you, and tell them: "Precious made it!"
Precious Opara | Website | Instagram | Film Diary