In Locutions: Fragments out of a Deluge, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe builds an exhibition around this question of containment: what things carry, what they cannot, and what leaks through regardless.  

Ukaigwe arrives here through an expanded practice of many utterances in paint, ceramics, sound, video, printmaking, all of which treat making itself as a form of listening. The ceramic vessels at the centre of this work were built fragmentarily, stacked bowl on top of bowl, resting on pillars adhering them together with layers of textured clay. Ukaigwe came to ceramics wanting immediately to work at scale, large, and ambitious before he had yet learned the language of clay. He wanted to fill his studio with vessels. Therefore, assembling of multiple vessels became a way to reach the scope he imagined before the material would allow it otherwise. Their surfaces swell and holes open, creating new vantage points into the vessels, and cone shapes burst from rims like interrupted speech. They are anthropomorphic without being portraits, communal without being anonymous, shaped, perhaps, the way communities are shaped: by pressure, by accumulation, by the decision to keep building on top of and around each other. 

These vessels hold sound. Microphones are nestled within their hollow interiors so that noise overflows like a fountain. The sounds were commissioned from Ukaigwe’s three brothers in Lagos, who were challenged and invited to listen to their environments differently. They captured the everyday sounds of the city. From the markets and the rain to the non-human utterances Lagos is a city that never stops composing. What they produced was not the sound of nostalgia, but something more precise: the attuned record of a place shaped by specific histories, frequencies of joy, and ways that people live with one another and contribute to the publicness of life in a city. A city’s vernacular sound is the result of its particular histories, local, cultural, technological, and to hear it anew is to understand that a deluge has always been building. 

The vessels sit atop collected furniture. The locally sourced objects, a wooden desk, table, chairs, spinning wheel, and butter churner, are not props. They are prompts. Discarded and recovered, they carry the quiet authority of things that have already lived, that have survived their owners, that arrive here as documents of time and care. The vessels rest on them like offerings. Or conversations. Or archives. 

The dichromatic ceramics glazed in yellow and black are the colours of buses in Lagos, and the bus stations where they gather are the epicentres where social and political life unfolds. Here the vessels are the transportation, and the gallery becomes the place where all of this arrives: the sound, the object, the memory, the overflow. 

Locution means utterance, a particular style of speaking, the grain of a voice. Ukaigwe asks what it means for objects to speak. What grain of voice does the vessel hold. What form of temperance does the furniture take. What sound does a city really make. The utterances of them all form a cacophony, a deluge of history, of place, of form still being learned. But this is only a fragment of that. The part that spills over. The part that cannot be contained. Ukaigwe the conductor, the maestro of accumulated listening, gathering fragments, holding them briefly, and letting them overflow.