Lower your ear to the oculus of an owoko vessel, drop your focus to its substratum like a bucket searching for a well’s ending, and you will hear echoes of its origin: the music of women gathered. Stories of the children, tongues curled around the corners of a proverb, ponderings about endurance and its costs, the parabolic swoosh of heads thrown back in gaiety, a rumbling laughter that, like a storm’s seeing, knows no bottom and no top. Each owoko carries annotations of its inception in its gut and on its skin alike. Native to Igbo women of the Niger Delta and made prior to Nigeria’s independence in 1960, these vessels are always formed collectively and are used to collect and transport water. Both in its making and its use, the owoko is a regenerative form: it quenches thirst both physiologically, in its ability to keep water, and socially through the communal labor of its creation.

Within ebere agwuncha’s owoko—a cylindrical pot made of gleaming, anthracitic ceramic—is the harmony of footfalls, a tangle of sisters and those who made them, the melody of a procession remembered by the clay. Before its arrival at Comfort Station for agwuncha’s solo exhibition in 2022, the artist left the vessel outdoors, its mouth open to accumulate a belly full of rainwater. Once replete, they sat in ceremony with the owoko and communed with the memory of their big sister who had recently fled home and whose whereabouts, at the time, were unknown to the family. Though agwuncha knew their sister was living, still, she could not be reached through terrestrial modes of communication. The sculpture served as a telepathic device, a physical amulet through which to invoke sororial kinship, soften grief’s edges, and, through the ether, become a student to the rugged ache of loss half-lived.

Like the heritage of owoko vessels, agwuncha’s artworks are cenobitic praise songs whose rhythm revolves around the Igbo principle of “eliminat[ing] the product and retain[ing] the process so that every occasion and every generation will receive its own impulse and experience of creation.”¹ To this end, the sculpture (“the product”) is not satisfied with sitting inert and untouched. Like any alive thing, it calls out for touch, it yearns to be emptied and renewed. Like any reincarnation of history, it tugs on velvet rope to ring the bell of generational rememory. As such, the artist invited all who visited the exhibition to partake in a ritual (“the process”) in which they poured water from the owoko into glasses and offered it to the mound of loam upon which the sculpture was placed. Here, a means of coaxing whispers out from the earth’s core.

Two years later, agwuncha installed soft structures, their sophomore solo show on view at Chicago Artists Coalition. The exhibition extended their exploration of how, as articulated by Chinua Achebe, “the Igbo world is an arena for the interplay of forces. It is a dynamic world of movement and of flux.”² This sensibility is exemplified by agwuncha’s vessel blessing, for which the artist lowered a clay sculpture into the voracious mouth of a wood-fired kiln. The sculpture’s circumference is licked by ashen marks that climb up its surface, like smoke billowing out from a cauldron. When vessel blessing was removed from the flame, a hairline fracture had split its body, meaning it could no longer perform its functional role of holding water, as owoko did. Instead of working to mend it, agwuncha gave the form over to the initiatory method of its formation–the hairline fracture a casualty willingly taken in the name of the god of entropy, in honor of “movement and of flux.”

Although the fracture was unintentional, the artist’s acceptance of vessel blessing’s dehiscence brings to mind what filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich says about the artist Simone Leigh’s forms: “I was thinking about Simone describing early pots she would make and that she would make them with no bottoms so that they sort of refused their practical purpose… you make something that maybe is really extravagant and really tries to be beautiful, something that is not obviously useful, something that refuses to cooperate with the demands of capitalism as having an immediate practical answer to the economy, because Black women deserve impractical, extravagant, beautiful avant-garde art too.”³ agwuncha hails from an industrial design background, one that is upheld by pragmatic considerations of use. With vessel blessing, they invite in the guidance of a deity of impracticality, extravagance, and the beautiful avant-garde.

Later in Achebe’s exegesis of Igbo aesthetics, Achebe states that “the striving to come to terms with a multitude of forces and demands which gives Igbo life its tense and restless dynamism and its art an outward, social and kinetic quality. But it would be a mistake to take the extreme view that Igbo art has no room for contemplative privacy.”⁴ Most of the forms in both owoko and soft structures point “outward” and, indeed, possess a “social and kinetic quality.” For instance, bowed lancet catcher takes the form of five woven reed sculptures that spring off the wall. Individually, the forms recall volcanoes; together, they form an archipelago. bowed lancet catcher breathes into being the impression of the artist standing beneath the earth’s crust, walking the tightrope between trembling tectonic plates, and delving their hands into the interstitial space between them from which new earth emerges. Their “outward” quality is extended by individual horse hairs, which the artist attached one-by-one to the apex point of each woven formation. This process involved sustained focus and quietude and demanded “contemplative privacy,” thereby pulling the sculpture into the realm of “restless dynamism” that Achebe describes.

Also included in soft structures is lancet portal, whose form recalls a fishing net, a hammock, a ladder, the bow of a boat, a chrysalis… lancet portal insisted on itself from the underbelly of reverie: “I don’t have dreams very often, which I’m learning. I don’t have a lot of dreams because I daydream so much. I had this vivid memory of being a fisherman and being on a boat. Knowing that my mom is from Port Harcourt which is this watery, rivery land in Nigeria, it just felt fitting that there has to be some line of fisherman or someone on the water in my family and so I wanted to embrace that and learn to make fishing nets,”⁵ which they did during their ACRE residency as well, becoming the pupil of their material. They describe their fisherman’s lineage as “a spiritual line that I want to go deeper into.” That depth was plunged in as the artist describes “knotting madly” as if under a trance, as if with each knot tied their fingers pluck a primordial harp beckoning their ancestors to rise, to speak. Of course, fishing nets also serve a practical purpose, one that is refused again here by inverting it; gravity flips and suddenly the net cannot be used to catch, but rather to cradle. 

lancet portal also nods to agwuncha’s ongoing fascination with architecture. They reference Carrie Mae Weems’ The Shape of Things (female) (1993) as a core reference, as well as lancet arches that punctuate Chicago’s built-environment. These antechambers of inspiration call the audience to recognize the lancet portal as a passageway – a berth that can be stepped into, as a form that can envelop, swallow, and protects. This gesture which sings back to the work of Simone Leigh, as well as Martin Puryear and Torkwase Dyson, all of whom make sculptures that swing a door open. Rather than being observed from the outside, these works invite you to enter, to bend at their mercy, to be transformed. Likewise, agwuncha’s offerings fan open to facilitate encounters with totality. 

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Works Cited

1. Chinua Achebe, “The Igbo World and Its Art,” Hopes and Impediments, (Penguin Publishing Group, 1990) 435–437. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. “Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich and Christina Sharpe in conversation, Loophole of Retreat: Venice,” Youtube, accessed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjGXkSv4RIY&t=37s ↩︎
4. Chinua Achebe, “The Igbo World and It’s Art,” Hopes and Impediments, 435. ↩︎
5. Quote from ebere agwuncha during the artist talk at Chicago Artist Coalition on July 24th moderated by curator Ionit Behar. More information here: https://chicagoartistscoalition.org/artists/ebere-agwuncha-2 ↩︎

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