Artist Mama Nike: ‘I found a way to make us ft.com

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Nike Davies-Okundaye’s headdress is more than 12 inches high, and even the underwhelming medium of Zoom cannot reduce its glory. A tower of black handwoven fabric, it is part headwear, part artwork, embellished with the same red beads that form a stiff collar which sits over her dress. “We make these beads from recycled water bottles,” she says, “then dye them. We take the stuff that litters the rivers and clogs up the gutters and bring it back to life.”

Mama Nike, as Chief Oyenike Monica Davies-Okundaye is most often known, is speaking to me from her five-storey building in Lagos, which she completed in 2008 and which houses an art gallery and a craft shop, as well as a private textile museum and a room dedicated to objects made from recycled plastic and metal. Artists and craftspeople entrust her to sell works in carved stone and wood, brass and copper, alongside embroidered, hand-dyed and -beaded textiles and paintings on canvas. Many of these are by Davies-Okundaye herself.

Davies-Okundaye, 71, is a superstar in her native Nigeria, an artist-cum-activist who has not only ensured the future of the traditional adire textile (an indigo-dyed cloth made traditionally by Yoruba women) but transformed the lives of thousands of women by teaching them the process. This October, kó, a gallery based in Lagos, is bringing her work to Frieze Masters, continuing the trend of textiles, such as quilts by the African-American community in Gee’s Bend, taking their place as artworks. Davies-Okundaye’s work will include batik, patchwork and embroidery. “It is now being recognised as art, not craft,” says Kavita Chellaram, the gallery’s founder. Though really, it is both.