Kikelomo’s conflation of motherhood and divinity or, more demonstrably, motherhood as a representation of divinity is evident in many of her maternity photography. And this, it appears, comes out of her Christian conviction in the divine agency of maternity as a representation of God’s creative essence.
By Chimezie Chika
Kikelomo Solomon-Ayeni (or simply Kikelomo), who began to take photographs professionally in 2011, has a unique oeuvre that shows women in different poses—although sometimes the poses are uniform—of bodily protrusion. The photos revolve around the condition of motherhood or its imminence; the subjects are either in different stages of pregnancy or carrying their babies (as in the “Backing the Baby” series).
The photos in her series, “African Preggy”, embody the photographer’s unrelenting fixation with maternity and its interconnection with the feminine identity; and this seems to also have emerged from a recent rise in African women showcasing their pregnancies. At the heart of this fixation is a wholly conservative way of seeing and understanding the world piloted by her Christian faith.
After a while of looking through Kikelomo’s photographic work, one begins to feel a variation of the hopeful anxiety that attends all expectant mothers, as if one has become an active participant in an art that celebrates her triangulation of maternity, motherhood, and what she sees as a fundamental aspect of feminine joy, in that order.
The dominant idea in the cool, mellow colours of Kikelomo’s photography is an unerring sense of the maternal—the photographs we see here find a way to hint at both its antenatal and postnatal struggles—as possessing a quality of the ethereal or even untouchable celestiality.
The Full Circle of Chance
Kikelomo was a student of Chemistry Education at Lagos State University in 2009 when she had a moment of chance with photography at the studio of a friend’s brother in Ojo, Lagos. The friend in question was one of her roommates at the university. The photographs she saw at the studio were different, unlike anything she had seen before, even as someone who had always loved the idea of taking photos from a distance.
The studio owner held mini-exhibitions of portraits and pictures he made. Kikelomo recalls that moment as epiphanic, her first encounter with photography as art. It led to her eventual apprenticeship with the studio owner who, seeing her enthusiasm and impecunious state, graciously decided to train her for free.
After two years of apprenticeship—by which time she was juggling school and conducting photography training on behalf of her master—she was freed and settled with a camera by her master.
The next few months, not knowing the direction she would go, she tarried, carrying her camera everywhere, taking random photographs. Her major conundrum was deciding whether to pursue photography or do something with her degree—though it was clear that she leaned towards the former. An issue had arisen with her family, her father especially, who initially thought her foray with a camera was more of a hobby than a lifelong preoccupation.
Amidst the equivocation that came at that period in her life, an aunt informed her that her interest in photography was not chance, for her grandfather, Pa Koleosho, had been a well-known photographer in his prime and had owned a thriving studio in Ojuelegba area of Lagos in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Since then, Kikelomo has had her photography featured in galleries and platforms in Nigeria and in Europe. Presently, she has an ongoing mini online exhibition.
In 2011, a workshop organised for young photographers by the Goethe Institute in Lagos culminated in her first exhibition. It was also the beginning of her interest in women and child advocacy. Kikelomo believes that more than any other force, a mother is the child’s greatest protector and nurturer.
In her photography, she tends to find a visual common ground for these two interests: motherhood and child care. Her child advocacy work, a subject of her Master’s degree in the UK, goes beyond photography to active organising and social work in disadvantaged communities in and around Lagos. But even more so for the viewer, the presence of that conceptual fusion appears even in photographs where the figure of womanhood predominates, such as in “Backing the Baby”.
Maternity and the Divine
In its mood and ambience, Kikelomo’s photography—often in black-and-white or muted sepia—seems to pose two fundamental questions of faith: Is maternity the greatest creative force of divine will? What is a mother if not a guardian angel? The evidence of these questions are sometimes so literal in their visual application that they are short of being uttered ad nauseam.
Upholding this rhetoric is Kikelomo’s belief that her art is given agency by her name, “Kikelomo”, which translates from the Yoruba as “a child is to be pampered” or “a child is to be cared for”. The idea of documenting the dual condition of maternity and childcare matured when the photographer became pregnant with her first child.
The main impetus was her overwhelming fascination with the reproductive ability of women. The more she thought about her pregnancy, the more she thought of the responsibility that came with this phase of her life.
She envisioned a visual commemoration of the journey of pregnancy: a long series of expectant mothers, pregnant women in different stages of their terms, their different moods and circumstances, but also, above all, their joy. Thus began a series of conceptual photographs that seems to follow a Jungian journey of a child’s progression from the womb to the world. These photographs hold a considerable fixation on the pregnant woman’s anatomy and physiognomy.
The photograph that introduces the maternity series is a portrait of Kikelomo (not a self-portrait). Here, a pregnant Kikelomo is captured in profile, her hands wrapped around the bulge of her belly, her sidelong gaze trained upwards towards the heavens, her white garment showing intricate lacework, and on her back and around her head, as in a halo, a shield of immaculate white feathers, like large wings.
The composition of the photo is framed in such a way as to be undeniably beatific; the expression on her face is one of blissful joy, as if the photographer wants us to see that the expectant mother as an angel—in short, the figure of the mother is here framed as a saint.
Kikelomo’s conflation of motherhood and divinity or, more demonstrably, motherhood as a representation of divinity is evident in many of her maternity photographs. And this, it appears, comes out of her Christian conviction in the divine agency of maternity as a representation of God’s creative essence.
Thus, in Kikelomo’s portraits of maternity, the mundane struggle of carrying a pregnancy is transposed into a celestial act. We see instances in the running series, “African Preggy Ready to Party”, in which she excavates the very essence of what she calls “this miraculous journey” of women, their “strength and beauty…as they nurture life within them.”
The images here celebrate, above all, the beauty of black bodies with protuberant bellies (Kikelomo’s subjects are almost unerringly African women and articles of cultural pride such as flamboyant headgear are always part of the images). Beyond their primary focus on maternity, each image is bestowed with the combined details of traditional and modern feminine flair. The photographer takes liberty with editing, curiously inverting, and dualising the images to create a shadow effect.
The first image in the series pictures a side view of a pregnant woman wearing sunglasses, one leg raised slightly as if she’s walking by, her head wrapped in a hijab, her palms held upwards as if in supplication. While the hint of prayer gives the image some religious aura, the most remarkable thing here is Kikelomo’s superimposition of two images, one slightly different from the other, though still featuring the same subject in the same quasi-prayerful pose.
Superimposition—in this case, especially, a sort of photographic palimpsest—and ellipses (the ellipses give the photos a certain level of abstraction) are at the heart of Kikelomo’s editing and compositional technique. Another image in the “African Preggy” series shrinks two images into one to form a singular picture of a multivalent figurine, with a confident head linked vacuously to a merger of different bodies. Is the photographer telling us to view pregnant women as enduring the enigmatic transformation in different cultures and bodies?
Other photos either place the images of the pregnant women within their own giant shadows or the shadows within the images. The condition of duality is always there in some of the monochromes. In one, a pregnant woman in a white wrapper and bead necklace, dualised in Kikelomo’s characteristic manner, so that she is both facing left and right, offers an impression that is wholly spiritual—the maternal figure of a priestess.
The common feature of these images is the women’s compulsive appearance in headgear and sunglasses; the combination of that exaggerated confidence and traditional fashion and pride seems to recuperate pregnancy as something that transcends the women themselves. In the markers of their clothing and poses, in their expectant gazes, we espy the beatific and a deference to the ethereal anatomical beauty of pregnant woman.
The Mystery of Burden
Kikelomo’s maternity photography places burden at the epicentre of pregnancy. The concept of burden reveals the constraints of movement and bodily agility; it further spotlights the daily struggles of carrying a pregnancy to term, the sickness, self-loathing and other side effects that come with it.
In Kikelomo’s vision, the beneficent Christian view of burden supersedes—emerging mainly from the famous 28th verse in Matthew 11 in the New Testament: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give ye rest.” Burden in these photographs is the burden of the unborn child, the burden of parturition, and the burden of nurturing the child once it is born. Specifically, the burden of maternity is the burden of motherhood.
The child develops a strong bond with its mother from the womb; the mother in turn feels an instinctive responsibility towards the child. This innate presence of the burden of responsibility that the mother feels towards her child is what Kikelomo wants viewers to feel when they look at her maternity images.
In the photo titled, “Pregnant Talking Drummer”, a pregnant woman’s body in traditional attire is once again captured from the side. On her left shoulder, she is carrying a traditional Yoruba talking drum, her left hand resting on the drum as if playing it. Her other hand is both holding the drumstick and propping the bulge of her belly.
The action of two hands seems to lay claim to both tradition and her unborn child as if acknowledging the primordial responsibility she feels. Her face, however, tilted towards the camera, shows her lips widening in a bright white-teethed smile.
Another photograph, “Iya Amo”, divests the subject of any props, but this time we see the pregnant woman admiring her belly in a forest background. The gargantuan roots of the trees in the background seem to offer her a rootedness to her surroundings.
These two photos seem to be commentaries on the influence of cultural origins in the way motherhood and maternity is perceived and practiced. The forest also alludes to the feminine attributes of nature in its ability to weather storms and regenerate and reproduce through the ages.
In each of these photographs, Kikelomo’s portraiture dwells on emotions—the complex carapace of emotions associated with the advent of pregnancy. The particular emotion is likely the subject of the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy. “Mystery Mommy”, a tripartite photograph of cool colour grading, captures a sombre pregnant woman in different poses. She is wearing a hat, but in the images, the hat obscures all or part of her face.
We feel the foreboding anxiety that surrounds her thoughts, the unknowable condition of what the moment of birth would be like. Yet, in her mystery, there are hints of defiance and acceptance.
“Winter’s Embrace” features a pregnant woman standing outside in a heavy snowfall. Again, here, the conflation of the beatific and the celestial cannot be missed. The woman is unmoved by the harsh weather around her, hands on her belly. Her white dress and shroud is Madonna-like.
It is paradoxical that the photo hints at chastity and purity, but perhaps the ubiquity of whiteness is saying something about the purity of a mother’s love for her children even in its unborn state—a burden which, in Kikelomo’s photography, is canopied with encompassing bliss.
Kikelomo’s construction of maternity photography, still incipient as it were, opens up conversations about a different kind of art in Nigeria that addresses a crucial aspect of the life of many Nigerian women, especially in a country where the risks of childbirth still persist and the infant mortality rates are still very high.
In many parts of Nigeria, children and women are exposed to numerous dangers, many of which are caused by both Nigeria’s security problems and the crushing inequities of its unstable economy. There is, therefore, no end to the importance of Kikelomo’s emerging maternity art.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, The Shallow Tales Review, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on Twitter @chimeziechika1.