Artist Focus: Vida Pamela Madighi-Oghu

This week, we turn our Artist Focus spotlight on the exceptional Vida Pamela Madighi- Oghu.

Vida Madighi-Oghu (b.2000) is a Nigerian-born, Cape Town-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of storytelling, material culture, and historical memory. They graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2022 and earned an Honours degree from the Centre for Curating the Archive in 2024. Madighi-Oghu describes themselves as a storyteller with a research-first approach, drawing deeply from their Nigerian heritage and multicultural upbringing across Nigeria, Angola, and South Africa. Their work engages themes such as language, traditional wear, historical objects, and migration—treating them not just as subjects, but as evolving systems of knowledge and identity.

Colour plays a central role in Madighi-Oghu visual language, used not only for aesthetic effect but as a conceptual tool to illustrate movement, invisible phenomena, and the complexity of visual translation. In their practice, fabric and clay become carriers of memory and resistance; she often references traditional textiles like ankara and integrates ideographic symbols such as Nsibidi to explore how visual forms encode meaning across time and cultures. Through both their art-making and curatorial work, Madighi-Oghu seeks to weave connections between cultural production and broader socio geopolitical historical narratives, especially those embedded in language, textiles, and material archives. Her work invites viewers into layered, speculative spaces where translation, visibility, and heritage intersect.

In this body of work, they continue their meditation on colour through a series of paintings on lining fabric. Experimenting for the first time mixing pigment in its semi- raw form with linseed oil, Madighi-Oghu was seduced by the liquid consistency of the paint they were able to produce, leaving them with the question,“How do I make this liquid maintain its liquidness?” Oil paint on canvas can be glossy – juicy, even – but ultimately dries. How to capture the painting in a state of flow? Research into vintage Margiela garments fashioned from lining fabric provided something of an answer.

Madighi-Oghu describes the process of combining lining fabric with handmade paint as alchemical. They grind the pigments with a mortar and pestle, gold and bronze particles rising into the air like smoke. Adding the linseed, they transmutes solid powder to liquid colour. They adapt to unexpected chemical reactions between paint and fabric and and improvises complementary colour combinations accordingly.

By folding, draping, shortening, lengthening and wrapping the fabric around itself, they work with levity and gravity, light and shadow, to make the painting sculptural in a way that’s reminiscent of Sam Gilliam, a major source of inspiration. Performing a delicate balancing act between experiment and play, their intuitive and obsessive way of working has resulted in works that feel altogether prepositional, liminal, caught in the

boundary between one state and another.