In conversation with Tunde Owolabi on “Without Rest, the Crown We Gain.”
By Helen Balogun
There is a particular kind of observation that most people never develop. Not just looking, everyone looks. Seeing.
The kind that slows you down in the middle of an ordinary morning and makes you ask why you have been taking something for granted. Tunde Owolabi has it. And it is the reason that a woman selling bread outside his studio became, over time, the spine of an entire body of work.
Without Rest the Crown We Gain, now in its final weeks at No Parking Lagos in Onikan, Lagos, is Tunde Owolabi’s fourth solo exhibition and his most layered body of work to date. A multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and designer, he arrived at this project not through a commission or a concept brief, but through the simple, disciplined act of looking out his studio door. The result is an exhibition of carved wood sculptures and photographic mixed-media works, each piece named after the women who inspired it, that asks a question we have all been too busy to ask: what do we owe the people who quietly hold everything together, without credit?
We sat down with Tunde to talk about the women, the wood, and what it means to pay attention.
[Tunde Owolabi at the exhibition opening| Credit: Tunde Owolabi Studios]
The women in this exhibition are not invented. They are people you observed outside your studio. What was it about them that stopped you long enough to want to make art?
Tunde Owolabi: I think it was the consistency. I would see the same woman selling bread almost every morning. Without rest, she was there, constantly at it. And at some point, I stopped walking past and actually watched her. I noticed she was also selling beans alongside the bread. So she had grown, considered what the people around her needed, and expanded what she offered. I bought my staff breakfast from her one day, and I just thought about how many people this one woman was quietly feeding. Construction workers, office staff, people passing through. She is one person sustaining all of that, and what she is literally carrying on her head is her entire enterprise. That is when the title began to form in my mind. Without rest, she has gained this crown. Her work is her crown.
[Agege Bread | Sculpture | Mixed media, wood and acrylic | Credit: Tunde Owolabi Studios]
You mentioned that there is a cultural dimension to the image of a woman carrying things on her head in West Africa that goes beyond the practical. How did this factor into the work?
Tunde Owolabi: When you look at it historically, women have always been the ones carrying, from the farm, from the stream, from the market, through generations. There is a balance and a grace in it that is almost ancestral. And there is a Yoruba understanding that what you carry on your head has a significance beyond the physical. The head is not just a body part. Philosophically and literally, what these women carry is a crown. Only they can tell you the weight of it. I wanted the work to honor that layering without being heavy-handed about it. The sculptures do not explain themselves. But if you know, you know.
“Philosophically and literally, what these women carry is a crown. Only they can tell you the weight of it.”
You are a visual artist. The natural instinct would have been to photograph these women and show the photographs. Why wasn’t that enough?
Tunde Owolabi: A photograph captures a moment. What I wanted to give these women was permanence. Something three-dimensional, something you could walk around, something that occupies a room the way they occupy the world, without anyone quite acknowledging how much space they are actually holding. A carved figure has weight. It has presence. You cannot scroll past it. And with wood specifically, the material is ancient. There is something right about using it to talk about something this enduring.
[Ki le n ta mama (Mama, what are you selling) | Sculpture | Mixed media, wood and acrylic | Credit: Tunde Owolabi Studios]
You had never worked at this scale in wood before. What did the medium demand from you that you were not expecting?
Tunde Owolabi: Precision. And patience in a very specific, physical sense. Wood carving is subtractive; you are only ever removing material, and what you take away cannot come back. So every decision carries more consequence than in a medium where you can layer over a mistake or start the canvas again. Every chisel mark is a decision the material keeps permanently. I had to slow down in a way that was new to me. But that discipline sharpened everything. I became more intentional, more present. And when the material surprised me, I had to learn to follow it rather than fight it.
Tell me about one of those surprises.
Tunde Owolabi: The piece called Hadiza. She had a specific pattern planned for her. A chisel slipped, leaving a completely different mark. I stopped and looked at it, and what I saw was more interesting than what I had drawn. So I put the original plan down and followed where the wood had gone. The accident became the design. And separately, in one of the photographic works, coffee spilled across a print, leaving a sepia bloom across the surface. I looked at it and could not bring myself to remove it. That color, that particular warmth, was more alive than anything I had put there deliberately, so it stayed.
[Hadiza | Sculpture | Mixed media, wood and acrylic | Credit: Tunde Owolabi Studios]
The photographic works in the exhibition are prints you have drawn over directly in charcoal. That is an unusual choice. What were you trying to do with that?
Tunde Owolabi: I wanted to be inside the image rather than just presenting it. A clean print says, here is what I saw. The charcoal says, “Here is what I saw, here is how I felt about it, and here is what I want to draw your attention to.” It is a dialogue between the document and the interpretation. And practically, it creates a bridge between the two bodies of work in the exhibition, the photography and the sculpture. You look at the drawn photograph, then at the carved figure, and trace the distance between them. That distance is where the whole meaning of the work lives.
“You look at the drawn photograph, and then you look at the carved figure, and you trace the distance between them. That distance is where the whole meaning of the work lives.”
The sculptures carry names like Ewa Agoyin, Iya Eleja, and Agege Bread. Every Lagos person will smile when they read those names and then maybe feel something else a moment later. Was that intentional?
Tunde Owolaobi: Everything about the naming was intentional. Those are names we say every day in Lagos without thinking about what we are doing when we say them. We have reduced some of these women entirely to what they carry. Iya Eleja is not her name. It is her trade. And we say it comfortably, familiarly, sometimes affectionately, and never stop to ask what is underneath it. I wanted to take that familiarity and put it somewhere formal, on a gallery wall, alongside work that has taken months of serious making, and see what people felt. The smile is the entry point. What comes after is the real question. What does that say about how we see them? I am not trying to make people feel guilty. I am simply trying to make people pay attention.
[Iya Eleja (Fish Monger) | Photographic print with charcoal | Credit: Tunde Owolabi Studios]
What do you hope someone carries out of the gallery with them?
Tunde Owolabi: A different kind of attention. The ability to walk out and see what they have been walking past. These women have not changed. They were always there. The exhibition does not introduce them; it just makes it harder to look away. If someone leaves and the next morning they actually see the bread seller, actually register her as a person rather than a transaction, then the work has done what it was supposed to do.
[Mama Nkem | Sculpture | Mixed media, wood, and acrylic | Credit: Tunde Owolabi Studios]
This is your fourth solo exhibition. What does the work feel like from inside it now that it is on the wall?
Tunde Owolabi: Fulfilling. I keep coming back to that word because it is the most honest one. You are in the studio with this work for months, sometimes longer, not knowing if it will reach anyone. And then it is in a room with people, and you can feel something connecting. That is the whole reason for doing this. When I see someone stop in front of one of these pieces and stay, and recognition on their face, that is everything. The work has found its people.
About the Artist
Tunde Owolabi is a Lagos-based multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and designer whose practice moves fluidly across fine art, visual design, and brand identity.
Founder of Tunde Owolabi Studios and the acclaimed Afrocentric fashion brand Ethnik Afrika, his work spans painting, sculpture, photography, and graphic design, always led by concept and driven by a deep commitment to storytelling.
As a visual artist, Tunde has exhibited across Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. His solo exhibitions include African Elegance at the Battersea Art Gallery, London (2009), AsoOke: The Woven Beauty (2014), and As We Were, As We Are at Cromwell Ngobeni Art Studio, Johannesburg (2022). His commissioned works are held at the Hungarian Embassy and the Nigerian Stock Exchange. He has also shown at Art X Lagos.
A graduate of Yaba College of Technology and alumnus of The Research Studios London, where he worked alongside renowned typographer Neville Brody, Tunde brings a rare cross-disciplinary depth to everything he makes. Without Rest the Crown We Gain is his fourth solo exhibition.
Without Rest, the Crown We Gain
Open through May 9, 2026 | No Parking Lagos, 15 Military Street, Onikan, Lagos
Presented by June Creative Art Advisory (JCAA)
hq@jcaalagos.com | www.jcaalagos.com | +234 817 983 0800 | +234 810 915 8656
