Damilola Odusote

Damilola Odusote's artworks are a running narrative of his conscious and subconscious mind which challenge the perception of everyday life with wit and humour. Although he predominantly works in graphic ink, he takes pride in process and method, and loves to experiment with more unconventional materials such as concrete and moulded Perspex for visual depth in his art. Rarely sketching first, Damilola’s artworks are organic and grow on the surface as he creates them. He is influenced by the likes of MC Escher and David Shrigley for the detail and humour in their thought-provoking works. He frequently experiments with the aesthetics of geometry and texture to contextualise issues rooted in politics, history, race, and culture.

To expand his creative repertoire, Damilola draws inspiration from everywhere and everything, not least in his parallel career as a professional dancer which he likens to his artistic practice as similarly requiring technique, training, research and expressivity, and where movement feeds creation. In particular, he finds that dance choreography mirrors his art, both requiring the same degree of intricacy, logic and a flowing narrative. Damilola continually refines his style with every new skillset he pursues.

Damilola graduated from Camberwell College of Arts with a BA Hons degree. He has a loyal client base in Europe, Asia and America, having exhibited all around the world. In the last ten years, he has been in high demand for large scale mural work with commissions from Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Converse, UBS, LinkedIn, NEXT, Caplin and Brixton House.

Who Am I is a series of work by Damilola Odusote that charts his distinct upbringing growing up in the Thames Estuary. It explores the issue of identity and uses his personal history to highlight the complex political, cultural and identity dislocation. Damilola was born to Nigerian parents and fostered by a White couple in Tilbury, Essex. He delves into the underlying issues that formed his identity as a person of colour raised in a culturally and economically deprived port town in Essex by foster parents from a Romany Gypsy heritage.

Growing up in Tilbury, Damilola was exposed to the social stratification of inequality, poverty and visceral racial conflict with first-hand experience of injustice, crime and unemployment. Despite the stability and emotional balance given to him by his foster parents, he had to rely on his creative wit and inner resilience to escape the visceral violent racism and discrimination in his environment. In Who Am I Damilola looks back on his tough upbringing and his rite of passage to the career he carved out against the background of adversity.

Damilola recreates and super-sizes the iconic BT phone booth from the 1990s that served as a landmark meeting point in Tilbury. This outsized phone booth serves as a physical and metaphorical symbol of connecting to the past and emanates the sense of childlike innocence and nostalgia that everything appears larger than life from a child’s view. The stark and sterile exterior of the booth is contrasted with an art-infused interior with immersive audio recordings emitting from the telephone receiver and around the booth.

Damilola will be engaging with children and young people along the Estuary to share his story and integrate their stories to form the audio recordings for the booth. He hopes that by encapsulating his past experiences with the current young people’s experiences in an iconic communication relic of the past, the phone booth will be a symbol of inspiration and hope for the future.