Cables, Waste, and the Weight of Braiding
By Patience Adekunle
The title of one of Patience Adekunle's 2026 works is Defiant. It is a single word, and it does what single-word titles rarely manage: it earns its keep. The piece is built from recycled electronic cables laid across canvas — coaxial wire, stripped copper, the frayed remnants of charging cords and household wiring — arranged into a portrait so deliberate in its construction that the substrate almost disappears. What you see first is the face. What you understand second is what the face is made of.
Adekunle is twenty-eight years old and works out of Ibadan, in Oyo State, Nigeria, where she grew up. She studied Fine and Applied Arts at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in Ogbomoso, graduating with a B.Tech, a degree that signals something specific about how Nigerian art education is structured: fine art housed inside a technology institution, craft sitting alongside engineering. Whether that proximity shaped how she thinks about materials — wire as both industrial component and expressive medium — is the kind of question worth sitting with when you look at the work.
Her practice, which she has been developing for five years, is formally precise. She sources electronic waste — cables, wires, the detritus of gadgets and construction sites — and fixes it to canvas, sometimes in combination with fabric, to produce portraits. The subjects are almost always women. The series Braided Not Broken, three installments of which appeared in 2026, makes the structural logic explicit: braiding is both the formal method and the metaphor, though Adekunle is careful not to let the metaphor do all the work. The cables are actually braided, actually interlocked, and the resulting surface holds tension the way a tightly woven structure does — everything pulling against everything else, nothing coming loose.
The scale of the e-waste problem she is drawing from is not abstract. Nigeria is among the largest recipients of secondhand electronics in the world, and Lagos handles a significant share of the continent's e-waste processing, much of it informal, much of it toxic. Adekunle has described the situation plainly: production and consumption happen at a speed that recycling infrastructure cannot match. She does not position herself as a solution to that problem. She positions herself as someone making it visible, which is a more honest claim.
"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction," she has written in her statement — a line that reads less like a philosophical position and more like a description of how she actually works, pulling apart cables to reassemble them, breaking down one object to build another. The destruction is literal. The wire that becomes an eyelid or a jawline was, before she touched it, a functional cord. That history stays in the object.
The seven works currently visible in her portfolio share a preoccupation with Black femininity and what she has called dignity — not dignity as a soft concept but as something structural, something that holds. core, also from 2026, sits alongside the Braided Not Broken series and Defiant in a body of work that is consistent in its concerns without being repetitive in its execution. Each portrait is a different face, a different arrangement of material, a different density of cable. The surfaces are not smooth. They are ridged, dimensional, the wires casting small shadows across each other — which means the work changes depending on where the light is coming from, which is not a minor point for a practice built on portraiture.
The Braided Not Broken series is worth dwelling on because the title is doing something the individual works are not. Each piece in the series — Braided Not Broken, Braided Not Broken II, and Braided Not Broken III, all completed in 2026, all worked in electronic cables and fabric on canvas — stands alone as a portrait: a specific woman, a specific arrangement of cable and fabric on canvas. But the series title introduces a condition: braided, which implies that something has been joined, and not broken, which implies that something has been tested. The women in these portraits are not shown in crisis. They are shown as present, composed, looking back. The drama, if there is any, is in the material — in knowing what the cables were before they became this. Across the three works, the cable density shifts; the third installment appears to compress the wiring more tightly at the crown of the figure's head, the braiding pattern becoming almost architectural, a structure that reads as both hair and load-bearing form.
In 2025, her work appeared at Undiscovered Abuja, a group exhibition in the capital that gave her early visibility outside her home state. The following year was considerably busier. In 2026, she showed at the +234 Art Fair through Soto Gallery in Lagos — one of the city's more commercially active survey fairs, where her cable portraits were placed in direct conversation with a broader field of Nigerian contemporary practice. That same year she was included in the Swan female artist exhibition mounted by Signature Beyond Gallery, a show built explicitly around women working in Lagos, and in Resonance: 15 Truths at One Art Gallery, also in Lagos, a group exhibition whose title suggests a curatorial interest in multiplicity and testimony. Four exhibitions in roughly a year and a half, all in Nigeria, which tells you something about where the market for her work currently sits and something about where it might go. The international attention is beginning, but the institutional base is domestic, and that is not a limitation so much as a fact about where she is in the arc.
She described her practice as championing the resilience of African communities, which is a phrase that could easily slide into the generic. In her case it does not, because the resilience she is describing is embedded in a specific material process: finding what has been discarded, assessing its remaining properties, and using it to make something that holds together under its own weight. That is a technical description of what she does. It is also, if you want it to be, something else.
What the work asks of a viewer is patience, which may or may not be a coincidence given the artist's name. The portraits are not immediately legible from a distance. You have to get close to understand what you are looking at, and then you have to get closer still to understand what it is made of. That sequencing — recognition, then material revelation — is built into the format. It is not a trick. It is the argument. The face draws you in; the cable reminds you of what the face cost.
Adekunle has said she wants her art to tell stories that last beyond the canvas. It is a simple statement and, in the context of her material choices, a loaded one. Electronic cables are not archival materials. They oxidize, they degrade, they carry the chemical residue of the manufacturing processes that made them. A portrait built from e-waste is, among other things, a portrait with a lifespan — which gives the word defiant a second meaning. The work insists on its own presence in spite of what it is made from, or maybe because of it.
Her artist statement frames the waste problem in terms of speed: we produce at a rate that recovery cannot follow. That gap — between the pace of consumption and the pace of remediation — is where her studio practice sits. She is not closing the gap. She is working inside it, pulling single cables out of the flow and slowing them down long enough to make them into a face. The studio, by implication, is a place where industrial time stops and something more deliberate takes over. Each cable has to be assessed, stripped if necessary, bent to a curve the portrait requires. The process is slow in a way that the supply chain that produced the cable was not.
The themes that run across the portfolio — identity, cultural heritage, self-expression, Black femininity, beauty, dignity — are not announced in the works so much as demonstrated by them. The women Adekunle portrays are not explained or contextualized by text on the wall. They are simply there, built from material that the world had finished with, looking out from a surface that was not supposed to hold them. That is, in the end, what the word defiant points at.
"I want my art to tell stories that last beyond canvas," she said.
Discover more of Patience Adekunle's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.