There is a woman in Beauty from Within whose hair is elaborate, whose bearing reads as elegant. Then there is her face, which says something else entirely. Working on that expression, Bisola Abdulrasheed said she kept seeing herself in it: a girl waiting for people to see her, to accept her, to confirm that she was enough. "While working on the face, it's just like I'm painting myself on the canvas," she said.
That doubling — the composed exterior, the frightened interior — is not incidental to Abdulrasheed's practice. It is the practice. Working from Ibadan, Oyo State, she builds portraits by stretching yarn between nails fixed to a board, layering strand over strand until a face emerges from the structure. She trained initially in painting at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in Ogbomoso, and has been making art for close to a decade — a span she describes as a path from painting into thread and nails, and from formal training into a practice oriented around the experiences of women and girls. The shift from paint to thread was not primarily a formal decision. She described it as a question of what could make people connect to those experiences. Thread, she said, has a kind of connection built into it: one strand going from one place to another, linking points that would otherwise remain separate.
Three works in her portfolio — In Her Space, Beauty from Within, and More Than Meets the Eyes, all dated 2026, each built on thread and nail on board — share the same underlying tension. The surface presents a woman who looks composed, even regal. The face, when you look at it long enough, holds something the posture is working to conceal. Abdulrasheed is deliberate about the sequence in which she wants a viewer to encounter this. She wants the face to come first. "The face is the major concern of the thread," she said, and only once that meeting has happened does she want the eye to travel outward — to the lines of thread moving across the board, the colors of the hair, the architecture of the composition. The face is the entry point; the structure is what you follow once you're inside.
This is a considered choice about how meaning moves through a work. The elaborate hair and the elegant bearing are real — they are not decoys. But they exist alongside a fear that the surface is not designed to advertise. Abdulrasheed said she felt that people tend to read women through the physical: the face, the clothing, the body, the skin. What she is after is the thing underneath that reading — the fear that coexists with the effort to appear strong. She described Beauty from Within as a piece about women who are trying to make themselves strong, in whom there is also a lack of strength they are working around. The facial expression in that work is the site where both things are simultaneously visible: the elaborateness of the hair signals one story, and the face beneath it signals another.
The girl child keeps returning as a reference point across her work. When asked what question persists through her practice regardless of how the portraits change, her answer was immediate: "I want to return to the girl child that I was." She is interested in what that girl was taught, what she was expected to carry, what she was told to accept, and what she learned to keep silent. The story she said she most wants to protect is the one about how society treats girls from a young age and what that treatment accumulates into by the time the girl becomes a woman. She is not making work that illustrates a thesis about this; she is, by her own account, trying to understand it. The two things are different, and she holds to the distinction.
She presented work at the +234 Art Fair in Lagos, which she described as an experience that contributed to her growth and to her understanding of how people encounter what she makes. The fair is one of Nigeria's more visible platforms for contemporary practice, and showing there placed her work in front of an audience already oriented toward the contemporary art space. She described the opportunity as one that allowed her to watch the work function in the world — to see which parts of the face register, which silences hold — and to keep refining the language she uses to make it. The development of this body of work, and finding a voice within it, is what she identifies as the most meaningful part of the practice so far.
That language is worth pausing on. Abdulrasheed's medium is not decorative thread work, and the portraits are not illustrations of ideas she has already formed. The process is where the thinking happens. She described working on the face of Beauty from Within as a moment of recognition that arrived while she was making it — not before. She was building the expression and found herself in it: the girl who was waiting for external validation, who wanted to be seen and accepted. That the work became a kind of self-portrait was something she discovered in the making, not something she planned. Her training was in painting, and she still describes working on the face in those terms — it felt like painting herself onto the canvas — even though the material is thread and the surface is board studded with nails.
The process itself carries physical stakes that are not incidental to the meaning. Abdulrasheed described working with thread as demanding patience and a tolerance for unpredictability. Thread behaves differently from paint; the tension between nails is not always what you expect, and the layering can shift the overall image in ways that are not fully controlled. She said there is something about taking something as delicate as a single strand and building something emotionally present with it that keeps her connected to the medium. The fragility of the material and the weight of what it is made to carry are both part of what she is working with. A strand, she has written, can hold a memory, a connection, a burden, a wound. The layering builds something that is structurally present without being verbally declared.
This matters for how the finished pieces function. Abdulrasheed said she wants viewers to look at the portraits of these women and think about the women in their own lives — their daughters, their mothers, the women they have known. She is not asking for identification with a generalized condition. She is asking for something more specific: that the viewer bring a particular face to mind, someone they know, and hold that face alongside the one in front of them. The portraits carry enough interior detail to make that kind of recognition possible. The fear in the face is legible even when the elaborateness of the hair is the first thing you see.
The question of what stays unspoken in the work came up more than once. Her artist statement refers to "the emotions that exist between what is spoken and what remains unspoken," and the transcript suggests this is not rhetorical. She is interested in the things women learn to carry silently, and she is making work that gives those things a face without naming them outright. The thread does not explain the fear; it holds it.
There is a practical tension in that ambition. Abdulrasheed wants viewers to receive the work without needing her to explain it, but the stories the work carries are specific enough that they require some kind of meeting point between what she has built and what the viewer brings. Her answer to this, as far as the interview makes clear, is the face. It is specific enough to register as a person and open enough to allow the viewer to bring their own associations. The thread structure around it — the connections running from nail to nail, the colors, the composition — becomes legible once the face has done its work of entry.
"Everything has been uncovered for now," she said at the close of the interview, when asked whether there was something important the conversation had not reached.
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