The recent Art Arising Art Festival, held from April 18 to 25 at the National Museum in Onikan, Lagos, featured a compelling new body of work titled Intertwine, created by Jessica Ajuyah and Oluwatimilehin Osunneye, also known as The Milkiwaey. This exhibition is a rare artistic endeavor that interrogates the environment and creative space in a manner that is both aesthetically appealing and intellectually stimulating. The theme of Intertwine is shaped by a long-standing friendship and shared creative history between the two artists.
Origins of Collaboration
Their first major collaboration was the Capsule Explosion, the inaugural issue of the Milkiwaey Magazine. This project marked the beginning of an ongoing creative partnership that has since expanded across multiple projects and evolving forms of expression. Ajuyah, a contemporary visual artist working across digital painting and mixed media, employs a research-led practice that centers on memory, identity, and lived experience. Her work examines how long-standing friendships shape perception and self-understanding over time.
Memory as Layered Construct
The artist considers memory not as something fixed, but as something layered and continually re-formed through experience. She reflects on how her practice has developed and the process of finding a voice, along with the complexity that comes with growing in one's identity while learning to take up space as a woman in the creative industry. Texture and structure play a central role in her work, allowing the surface to carry both visual and conceptual weight. While developed digitally, the works are resolved with close attention to composition and material presence, and are presented within physical exhibition contexts.
Artistic Approach and Influences
Ajuyah, an art director whose work combines intricate design with a clear and refined visual approach, is inspired by the vibrancy of different cultures and the power of visual storytelling. She creates pieces that speak directly to her audiences. Her projects span branding, publications, and fine art, each marked by a delicate balance of detail and meaning. In the technique showcased, she demonstrates a shift towards clarity in methods and decision-making. The creative process becomes more structured, moving from exploration into intention. She points out that different influences begin to separate into a more defined approach, where experimentation is guided by personal voice, heritage, and instinct.
Working across digital and physical spaces, she treats each project as a story to be told, with an emphasis on subtlety and authenticity. Her approach is deeply collaborative, blending her insights with those of her clients to create work that feels both distinctive and approachable. Her dedication to thoughtful, impactful design ensures each piece resonates on a personal level, leaving an impression that is as lasting as it is quiet.
Exhibition as Structured Environment
Ajuyah approaches each body of work as a unified project. Individual pieces are developed in relation to one another, with attention to rhythm, spacing, and how meaning unfolds across a space. This allows her exhibitions to function not simply as a collection of works, but as structured environments where viewers are invited to spend time, return to specific pieces, and form their own interpretations through sustained engagement.
In Step into my world, she presents a more confident stage of practice, where creative direction is established and more openly expressed. The work reflects a readiness to share process and take on ideas with less hesitation. Collaboration and shared history remain present as part of how the practice continues to evolve. Her process involves constructing and reworking complex visual surfaces, using layering, repetition, and controlled shifts in color and form to reflect the way memory accumulates, fades, and resurfaces.
Shared Development and Recurring Motifs
Working from similar environments but often in different spaces, the artists reflect on how their practices have developed alongside each other. The works explore the process of finding a voice and the complexity that comes with growing into one's identity while learning to take up space as women in the creative industry. Recurring forms of branches and bubbles appear throughout the process, shifting in meaning. At times, they hold things in places, they protect, and they open new paths. They trace a way of thinking about growth as something guided by both restriction and possibility.
Across six digital paintings, the story moves through individual expression and collaboration, forming an engaging exchange between two artists whose ideas continue to meet, separate, and return. One of the works, titled Soft Altitude, reveals an early entry into the creative space, where ideas are formed through exposure and influence. Ajuyah says that nothing is fully defined yet, with different inputs overlapping as the work develops. It sits in a stage of learning, absorbing, and responding to what is around.
Career Highlights and Impact
From February 2025 to the present moment, Ajuyah has created compelling visual narratives and led diverse creative projects, from editorial photography to magazine design and illustration, bringing ideas to life with a strong artistic vision that inspires and elevates brand storytelling. Her work has been exhibited across the United Kingdom and Nigeria, including a solo exhibition at Terra Kulture. Her exhibitions have received media coverage in national publications and have contributed to ongoing conversations around memory, identity, and the representation of lived experience within contemporary visual art. She continues to develop her practice through exhibitions, research, and collaboration, with a focus on producing work that is both visually resolved and conceptually grounded within contemporary discourse.
