Yinka Olatunbosun
For multidisciplinary artist Godspower Okoro, storytelling has been at the heart of his visual practice since 2011. With roots in Imo State, southeastern Nigeria, Okoro continually returns to his cultural heritage, drawing from its myths, rituals and inherited memories and translating them across painting, mixed media and installation. His experiences of living and studying in Lagos and Aberdeen, Scotland, have further widened this cultural vocabulary. The result is a body of work in which symbolism becomes both a repository of collective memory and a language for healing, resistance and identity.
Within Okoro’s visual universe, Igbo beliefs such as the Iyi-ụwa and the Yoruba concept of the Abiku exist alongside Scottish legends such as the Stoor Worm. In Igbo cosmology, the Iyi-ụwa is understood as an object or token connecting an Ogbanje child to the spirit world, enabling its repeated return. A related belief occurs in the Yoruba Abiku tradition, which has also found expression in the works of writers such as Wole Soyinka.
Okoro’s study of Scottish history led him to the legend of the Stoor Worm, the enormous sea monster said to have used its tail to crush ships, flood coastal villages and wreak havoc upon the land. Rather than treating such stories as quaint relics of an imaginative past, Okoro excavates their psychological and metaphorical possibilities. Beneath their fantastical surfaces, he finds narratives of grief, migration, sacrifice and renewal. Folklore consequently becomes a means of opening conversations about shared human anxieties, from displacement and ecological collapse to the stubborn endurance of cultural memory.
In the mixed-media work Sisters of the Soil (2025), Okoro reimagines the Scottish mythology of the Stoor Worm. According to the legend, the sea monster demanded a weekly tribute of seven virgins from the villagers. Okoro transforms this gruesome premise into a meditation on ritual sacrifice and vulnerability. Seven young figures, dressed in Ankara wax prints and Scottish tartan, appear suspended between ancestral narrative and contemporary reality. They seem caught in those final moments before submission, poised at the edge of despair as they await the jaws of the mythical sea serpent.
The figures become vessels for questions of voice, mimicry, sacrifice and survival. Their imagined screams evoke lost innocence and unspoken strength. Through a pointillist technique and an intricate interplay of textiles, Okoro cross-pollinates African and Scottish visual traditions, turning the work into a symbolic meeting point of fragmented identities. Hybridity here is not merely an aesthetic proposition but a condition of cultural entanglement and, ultimately, resilience.
His admiration for Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is also discernible in the fragmented compositions and layered textures through which he explores silenced voices, cultural memory and systemic violence. Like Picasso’s great anti-war painting, Okoro’s work functions simultaneously as memorial and protest. It is a quiet scream for justice, while also registering the psychological burden carried by histories of violence and abuse.
This concern with memory becomes more intimate in Broken but Not Empty (2025), created while the artist was processing a personal loss. Here, art becomes a pathway towards healing and collective empathy. The work refuses the familiar expectation that grief must quickly give way to resilience. Instead, it gives sorrow a material presence, allowing the broken to speak without being hurried towards repair.
Okoro’s engagement with Yoruba and Igbo cosmologies has deepened his understanding of the agency attributed to ritual objects. Ere Ibeji, Ogbanje, Shigidi and the Iyi-uwa are not simply cultural artefacts in this imaginative framework; they are objects embedded in social, spiritual and ancestral networks.
This understanding is particularly striking in the ceramic “Broken but Not Empty”. Also born of personal loss, the work draws upon the Igbo symbolism of the pot as a spiritual container associated with fertility, domesticity and ancestral presence, as well as the Iyi-Ewa as a ritual object linking the living and the spirit world. Its fracture is deliberately raw—neither beautified nor concealed. The broken form becomes a metaphor for healing understood not as restoration to an imagined original state but as an act of remaining present with what has been lost.
The vessel consequently assumes the character of an altar of memory, honouring a grief that cultural narratives often silence in their insistence on endurance. By placing the broken object in public view, Okoro transforms private mourning into a communal act of witnessing. What is fractured, the work suggests, need not cease to be sacred. It can continue to carry memory and meaning, while retaining the possibility of renewal without erasing the scars of loss.
What makes an encounter with Okoro’s works memorable, therefore, is not simply the authenticity of their cultural references. It is the way they unsettle familiar assumptions, awaken curiosity and turn inherited myths into living questions. His works do not merely preserve stories; they interrogate what those stories have carried across generations—the fears, rituals, identities, wounds and hopes that continue to gather in the memory of those who encounter them.