The art ecologies in different parts of the world are classic pastiches of the acclaimed masculinity that drive the material world. The realities in most art circles embody a male-privileging tendency with a few women practitioners operating as iconoclastic cosmetics on the art landscape. Even in the face of counter-critiques, which insist that the world is indeed woman-driven, most art ecologies have proved otherwise. In modern Nigeria for instance, there are many female art students, many female ex-students of art, but very few active, practicing female artists. Although some female artists would insist that they trained as artists, not female artists and are, therefore, simply artists,1 the feminist enterprise and the reality of the Nigerian situation do not obviate the presence of the female artist both perceptually and conceptually. Perhaps the spectacularity of the female presence in most art ecologies, including Nigeria’s, is related to number. Unlike many other professions in Nigeria, for instance, art is, perhaps, the only one where the dearth of the female presence has been most durable and palpable.

But it was not so in pre-contact society. Art was a communal thing. The ability to create belonged to everyone, although a few were the vanguard of such creativity. But art was life and it was in its essence that the central myth of the society was located. Women participated freely in major art genres. Of course some traditional societies, such as the Igbo, were not gender-specific, especially at the level of language, although women had their specific roles in society and did not need to compete with men from any pedestal similar to contemporary feminism. Unlike the contemporary art scene, which is dominated by men, there were instances in the so-called traditional scenario where women surpassed men in the creative enterprise. The Igbo uli tradition is a classic example. Even in the male-dominated masking tradition among the Igbo, industrious, creative and socialite women were chosen as nne mmanwu (literally, mother of masked spirits, or in other words, mother of the mmanwu theatre), a highly exalted position which distinguished its holder in the community.

If the contemporary art scene in Nigeria could be related to the Igbo mmanwu theatre, it may, perhaps, be appropriate to award the position of nne mmauwu to one female artist who has been very visible, active and consistent in the last two decades. That artist is Ndidi Dike, although she is still young and in the bloom of her very promising career. I am unaware of any other female artist in Nigeria of today who has done so much and deserves so much. In the style of a tenacious Amazon, Ndidi Dike strides rough-shod, against the wind, along and over the rocky terrain of modern art in Nigeria.

Dike’s career as an artist and a veritable cultural actor has been a chequered and colourful one. Originally trained as a musician at the prestigious University of Nigeria, Dike later enrolled at the same university in 1979 to study fine Arts, majoring in painting. Yet on graduation in 1984, she made a dramatic turn to sculpture, allowing the works of the Ghanaian El Anatsui to provide her with the initial stylistic spin-off. But Dike is a restless artist, one persistently seeking to redraw the contours of her vision and experience. Thus her deeply imaginative mind has wandered from one level of creative experience to another as she sought over the years to domesticate the enabling idioms in her work towards the attainment of her own distinct voice. As her project in the last twenty years shows, she did not abandon painting and music. Her sculpture – both in panels and in the round – are punctuated with colour in a way that brought freshness and uniqueness to them, and the colours themselves and other linear calibrations felicitously aspired to the lyrical ideals of music.

But in the present exhibit, Dike is making yet another turn, dramatic as ever. She is returning to painting, making her way through the forest path of tradition to rediscover the charm and graphic rhythm of ancient uli. I recently overhead Dike insisting at a Lagos forum that she is “not an uli artist”. She does not have to be. But her current project only reaffirms Jonathan Sack’s contention that “Traditions are never lost. They can be renewed or re-invented. All it takes is for them to be christened.”2 Dike’s present renewal of her uli-related paradigm also concretises Elliot’s claim that the individual talent can only be judged and appreciated in light of the overall tradition to which it belongs.

Primarily, Dike belongs to the Nsukka/uli “group”, as Ottenberg (1997) would describe it,3 but her travels and forays in different parts of the world, with the attendant professionally salutary exposure, inscribe her as a good model of what Picton et al (1998) has described as “transvanguarde”.4 Yet for her, “transvanguardism” is not a variant of stylistic harlotry, political correctness or normalisation in identity. It only reflects for her that delicate point where “the real me” meets with the challenge of “the reality of the others” and is able to contain and commingle with them without losing the centralising essence.

The present exhibit epitomises this fact. The works are a return to history, to tradition. But Dike, cleverly, does not allow herself to be trapped in the grove of history and tradition. From the very depths of her roots she is able to raise her eyes and catch some useful glimpses of other ideas, which have shaped her sensibilities. Thus it may be too simplistic an approach to classify her as an uliist, although a cursory glance at her works may mislead one to such a judgement. Even now that she seems to be making a conscious effort to reunite with her culture, using uli, as a possible road map, one cannot deny the infusions of nsibidi, adire ideas, Islamic motifs as well as kente and adinkra of Ghana. Yet one interesting character of Dike and her works – at least for now – is that she is not swept away or confused by what she sees abroad in her numerous travels, quite unlike some widely travelled artists, including her very own mentor, who in spite of an electric career, has, in the main, followed a rather chameleonic course of development. In other words, Dike is not a “hit-and-run” or “parachute” artist as far as stylistics is concerned; her paradigmatic shifts have been very progressive, as the attainment of one style merely complements another.

Although she has turned to painting in A Tapestry of Life, the paintings still embody the main characters of her wood panels. Evidently, the same simplicity and economy of means have been carried over to the paintings, and this is done with such dexterity and wealth of imagination that meaning, content and philosophy are in no way impoverished. Not only that. Her sense of abstraction and her understanding and exploitation of the interplay of positive and negative spaces in the over twenty paintings and four sculptures is a canonical commonality that she shares with the uli classicists and neo-classicists.

In A Tapestry of Life, Dike takes a holistic view of life. Her subjects range from the deeply personal to the socio-political. Hence we encounter such themes as Windows on My Mind, Leopard in My Thoughts, Life Games, Indigo Dreams, A Royal Puzzle, Emblems of Power and Unity, and Fat Cat Oppressors. Generally, these are mental gestures which the artist has deployed in response to some personal and collective experiences in her geo-political environment with its characteristic “apocalyptics” and attendant extremis (that is, the conscious effort to realise apocalypse and bring history itself to a forcible end)5 and untold social disasters. Dike is not necessarily political; she is not apolitical, either. She is a sensitive and tenacious cultural actor responding constructively and positively to the realities of her time, as the spirit moves her. As the title of the exhibition implies, the works are decisive stitches in a very colourful tapestry woven around the hydra-headed phenomenon of life, life as seen through Dike’s extra-sensory eyes.

If I should return to my opening thesis in this piece, I should note that this exhibit inscribes Dike as a totem of hope for Nigeria’s largely passive female artists. While it validates her special position in the contemporary art circle in Nigeria, it should also become an invitation to other female artists to come out and take their rightful places in the art scene and problematise the passivity that has pegged their male counterparts very wrongly as predators in a lopsided art ecology.