The title came first. We Are What We Cut Down — Adewole calls it "like a typography, like a template," the foundational phrase of his practice. The two works carrying that name, both completed in 2026 using reclaimed wood on board, are the most recent entries in a portfolio that has been building, slowly and deliberately, since he started working professionally about nine years ago. The phrase does double work. On one level it is ecological: deforestation diminishes the oxygen supply, raises local temperatures, collapses habitat. On another level it is relational. He described how people who matter to us at one stage of life — schoolmates, mentors, early collaborators — can fade from view years later, and how letting those relationships lapse is also a kind of self-diminishment. The ecological and the interpersonal run in parallel. He did not force them into a single argument; he offered them as two sides of the same idea and left the tension between them open.
Adewole works in Ogbomoso, in southwestern Nigeria, with wood sourced from sawmill offcuts, old furniture, and other discarded wooden objects. He studied Art, Design and Printing Technology at the Polytechnic of Ibadan, completing his National Diploma between 2021 and 2024, and has added to that formal training through mural residency work at KAP Film Village and collaborations with other artists. The medium he has settled on is among the more demanding choices available to a figurative artist: reclaimed wood requires constant assessment before a single mark is made. He described thinking through whether a given piece of wood has been properly treated, whether it can hold up over time, and how those questions slow the process even when demand pushes toward speed. He put it plainly — the doubt about the medium shows up, and he did not dress it up as anything else.
What keeps him with wood rather than switching to something less resistant is, by his own account, the vision rather than the material itself. He described becoming emotional when a piece reaches roughly eighty percent completion — the moment when it becomes clear the work will hold together. Before that point, the process is slow, uncertain, and sometimes genuinely discouraging. The vision he returns to, the thing that produces what he called "the goosebumps to keep moving," is the plan to use twenty percent of proceeds from each sold work to fund tree planting in local communities. The financial commitment is built into the practice as a structural element, not an afterthought. When doubt about the medium surfaces in the studio, he said, remembering that commitment is what resets him.
He also described using meditation as a working tool — mantra techniques, breathing, visualization — as part of his affiliation with the World Peace Initiative, where he identifies as a peace rebel. He was candid that his process is not organized in the conventional sense: the work flows from inspiration, not fixed plans. He meditates, uses the mantra technique most often, and said that when his mind clears afterward he can begin to picture what ten or twenty finished works might produce — how many trees, what scale of contribution. Whether that openness to inspiration is a limitation or a productive condition is not something he resolved, and he did not try to.
The 2022 portrait of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the WTO, made as a large-scale mixed-media work for the Citadel View Estate Art Competition, shows that Adewole's figurative practice has extended beyond reclaimed wood into other materials when the project calls for it. The same year he entered the Face of Liberty International Art Competition at Dan Pencil Gallery in Lagos, reaching the top seven shortlist. In 2023 he produced a three-by-six-foot figurative work in salt medium for the Dangote Salt Art Challenge — a significant departure in material that sits in the exhibition record but does not appear in his current portfolio description. These earlier competitions and commissions mark a period of working across mediums before the reclaimed-wood practice became the primary focus.
By 2024 the recognition had shifted toward that focus: First Runner-Up at the Zarita Fashion and Arts Fusion event at MUSON Shell Hall in Lagos, covered by ThisDay and the Independent Newspaper; repeated appearances on Channels TV's ArtHouse programme; a feature placement on Joue La Belle, a UK luxury art and décor platform. Profiles followed in Bold Journey Magazine and The System Magazine. Adewole described these as part of a broader effort to make the vision legible beyond Ogbomoso — the argument behind the work, alongside the work itself.
That argument centers on a revaluation of the discarded. "Wood is not really a garbage," he said. "Wood is actually a gold." The statement is simple, but the logic behind it is specific: a piece of wood that arrives in his studio as an offcut or a broken chair has already served as a living tree, producing oxygen, providing shade, supporting other species. It was then felled, processed, used as furniture, and discarded. Adewole sees that history as something that should be honored rather than erased. He wants viewers to look at a finished portrait made from that wood and recognize the full arc — forest to furniture to artwork — rather than seeing only the craft on the surface. The parallel he draws to human relationships is deliberate: just as discarded wood has a prior life worth acknowledging, so do the people we stop investing in.
On the question of how much to tell a viewer before they encounter the work, he was deliberate. He said he wants the work to function as a mirror, not a lesson — that an instructional frame closes down the reflection he is trying to open. He wants a viewer to stand in front of a portrait built from old furniture and let their own conscience speak: about how they treat the objects in their home, about relationships they have neglected, about how they relate to the environment around them. He described this as a "free room" — the work sets conditions for reflection without directing its outcome. The one point he said he does want to state clearly, the thing he needs to say to protect the meaning, is that collecting the work is also a contribution to regeneration. Buyers are not acquiring a decorative object whose value may appreciate; they are, in his framing, participating in the environmental commitment that twenty percent of the sale price represents.
The longer-term plan he described is larger than the studio practice and more speculative. He spoke about a cultural landscape — not a residency in the conventional sense — where trees of different species would be planted and allowed to grow over time, where students could engage with agriculture and forestry, where employment could be created for people trained in those fields, and where visitors from across the continent could come for what he described as a therapeutic experience embedded in a living environment. He mentioned monks from different countries coming to Nigeria for meditation, the possibility of extending the model across West Africa, a space where no plant or animal would be harmed. He acknowledged he has not found a precedent for the specific combination he is imagining. Whether the plan is near-term or distant, he did not specify, and the interview did not press him on timeline or resources. What came through was that this landscape functions as the horizon point that gives the current studio work its direction — each piece sold is, in his accounting, a step toward that space.
The question that returns most often across his work, he said, is how much more would be possible with institutional support. The rate at which trees are cut in his local area outpaces replanting by a margin he finds difficult to accept, and the twenty-percent commitment from sales is, he acknowledged, a start from where he is rather than a solution at scale. He closed with the problem framed as a question rather than a declaration: "How do I want my work to solve the environmental problem and also help the youth and the community at large?"
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