The deep time of the African continent is rarely afforded its own mythology in the global contemporary imagination. While Eurocentric narratives historically led the field of paleontology, the soil of all continents tells an un-compromised, shared story of life, mutation, and survival. My work takes a Pangaean approach—rooted in Africa, but recognizing a time before continents fractured into distinct borders.

Born of my experience becoming a mother of a multiracial family, this body of work initiates a speculative reclamation of African palaeontology. The creation of a multiracial lineage forces a confrontation with inheritance, identity, and the fluid blending of worlds; it mirrors the ancient Pangaean reality where all lineages emerged from a single, unbroken soil. By rendering the continent's prehistoric giants to their exact, life-sized physical scales, the canvas ceases to be a decorative object and becomes a monumental site of confrontation. These are not merely representations of extinct fauna and flora; they are structural monuments to the deep-time archive of African geography and the expansive definition of family.

The Cinematic Orality of Tales by Moonlight

The narrative architecture of this series is directly informed by the legendary television program Tales by Moonlight. Growing up, the ritual call-and-response (“Story, Story / Story. Once upon a time / Time, Time”) transported an entire generation into a village setting under the evening sky, where the boundaries between the human, ancestral, and animal kingdoms were fluid.

By adopting this exact logic, each dinosaur painting in this series operates as a frozen episode of an ancient, unrecorded folklore. Just as Tales by Moonlight used anthropomorphic animals to mirror human complexities and cultural values, these prehistoric leviathans are cast as characters within an original, mythological ecosystem. The artist acts as the contemporary "Aunty" or "Grandpa" figure, gathering the audience around massive canvases to pass down new moral mythologies regarding survival, ecological dominance, and legacy.

The Graphic Ecology of the Oshogbo Line

Visually, this project functions as a direct evolution of the traditions popularized by the Oshogbo Art Movement, specifically channelling the dense, kinetic graphic language of Twins Seven-Seven.

By discarding colour in favour of a strict, unyielding black-and-white palette, the works reject the easy traps of tropical exoticism or commercial decoration. The viewer is forced to confront the pure architecture of line, form, and texture. The intricate, vibrating patterns that coat the hides, plates, and environments of these creatures do not merely fill space—they represent a living tapestry of folklore, cosmology, and cell structures. It is a visual language where the prehistoric meets the hyper-modern.

Post-Contemporary Myth-Making

To paint a creature like an African dinosaur is to engage in an act of world-building that disrupts the gaze thus far. This series repairs rupture to date, by stitching ancient biological heritage to frontier post-contemporary visionary effort. Each footprint and egg study serves as a conceptual archive.

This series positions the artist not as a mere illustrator of the past, but as a host-curator of a vast, sovereign ecosystem—bridging the gap between the soil beneath our feet and the stories that define our future.

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