Tomilola Olumide is a Nigerian Multidisciplinary Artist who documents autobiographical assemblages and personal history narratives, chronicling her identity, memories, emotional landscapes and experimentation of materials and subjects inspired by her upbringing in Lagos, Nigeria and her navigation of life in adulthood.
She works inter-disciplinarily across mediums like sculpture, new media, painting, performance and literature and uses materials from found objects to personal memorabilia, textile fabrics, plaster, paint and her physical body as objects, expressions of medium and explorations of tactile memory, intimacy, sensuality and aesthetics between herself and subjects.
Olumide is currently working on Assembly 2024, a group exhibition programme led and commissioned by Multistory in partnership with The New Art Gallery Walsall. The program premiers between August and November 2024, and is a part of Multistory’s Blast Creative Network (BCN) programme, an artist development program for emerging Artists in the Black Country region.
She is also working on the BOM Immersive Arts Bootcamp: Unreal Engine 5 at Birmingham Open Media as a professional development program which she looks forward to expanding her knowledge and curiosities of immersive technology at the intersection of art and product design.
Tomilola recently concluded two professional development programs between January and March 2024 at organizations In Transit for the 'Removing Barriers: Making your work accessible' course and the 'Studio Maker' program at STEAMhouse. There she learned about sustainable strategies to create equitable accessibility for audiences of varying abilities and disabilities through the administration, curation and programming of artwork, text and public projects as an artist and creative practitioner at In Transit, and upskilling in new technologies and craftsmanship between ‘Printmaking and Metal-work’ at STEAMhouse.
Olumide studied at The University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art where she earned her Bachelor's degree in Fine Art. Her art studio is based in Birmingham, UK, which has been a site of activity for her career over the past year.
Tomilola's recent projects include her virtual reality and mixed media residency project Wá wò ó for her Spot VR Residency at Stryx Gallery (2023), her algorithmic and spoken word performance Pressure x Walk for the (Algo|Afro) Futures 2023 program at Vivid Projects (2023), and her audiovisual performance installation Moving to Words a residency project for the EOP Summer Camp 2023 at Eastside Projects (2023), Lamentations of Lips that Keep Moving (2022), Ádun & Pressure | Beyond Otherness at Open Hand Open Space Gallery (2021).
Olumide is focused on developing and expanding her career across her studio practice and research, writing and curation, pursuing postgraduate and doctoral study, occupying international opportunities from residencies, exhibitions, fellowships, commissions to cross-disciplinary collaborative project exchanges with creative practitioners, communities and institutions. She’s also enthusiastic about sharing her work with new audiences through artist talks, public programming, studio presentations and workshop facilitation.