A-ARTs: Storytelling through textile art, drawing

'Stories Beneath the Old Tree' (mixed media, dated 2026) by Christian Apanisile.

By Tajudeen Sowole

FROM modern to contemporary, artists keep proving the resilience of drawing as foundational textures of art and craft. This much of skills as a major foundation in art seems to be a strength for textile artist, Christianah Anuoluwapo Apanisile, despite her imperfection in areas such as perspective judgement.

For Apanisile, textile art comes as a vessel to lift native and indigenous fabric contents through the window of what looks like simplified mixed media. Loaded with indigenous narratives, her works celebrate the value of generational gaps as well as communal exchange in African traditional and contemporary settings.

On its own, textile belongs in the craft family, except when used in a more deliberate higher level of creativity. Lifting craftsmanship to that level of creativity is Apanisile’s draughtsmanship skills, stressing drawing as one of the basic structures of art. The drawings, sometimes with weaving technique on textile, bring figurative imageries alive with other environmental subjects, strengthening her works with more energy into the art realm, than craft.

With the Dutch wax print famously known as Ankara in Nigerian textile terminology, Apanisile tells the stories of tradition and generational gap in terms of cultural and communal harmony. In elevating her skills through simplified drawings, she uses other mixed media to recollect the nostalgic experience of playing games by most Nigerians, especially the lower class communities.

The process of knowledge and heritage transfer from older to younger generation is expressed explicitly in one of her works, Stories Beneath the Old Tree. An old man narrating stories from his past experience to two girls exemplifies the storytelling tradition of most communities as represented in the work. Capturing the attentive state of the children, in animation-like technique with the gesture of the old man, highlights the drawing skills of the artist.

However, the imperfection in the composition of the scene seems to compete with the commendable drawing skills of the artist. From the seated man, facing the two girls who are also seating on mini-chairs, to the capturing of the environment such as the tree, something seems unaligned in the artist’s composition. In the artist’s efforts to emphasis the ‘beneath the tree’ part of the theme, the seated man appears taller than the tree, if he stands.

If Apanisile’s Stories Beneath the Old Tree were an image for graphic illustration, a critical note on the unaligned tree and the seated man would have been needless. But as an art piece, even within the textile identity or medium, the visual culture in scaling imageries deserves to be well articulated.

Whatever critical view anyone throws at the composition contents of Stories Beneath the Old Tree, Apanisile’s drawing skills in another work suggests a mastery approach. In the work titled Lessons by the Fire, nearly every aspect of the subjects is perfect to the scale of the composition. In the rendition of the two seated figures, the eye levels across generational gap speak so much about knowledge transfer from mother to a daughter. More symbolic to the knowledge and heritage transfer culture is the capture of a cooking object, into the frame, as Apanisile proves her worth in drawing skills.

Abandoning bold colors, the pseudo-monochromatic textures of Apanisile's works, surprisingly, contrast with the loud tones of the famous Anara fabrics. Toning down her works in conservative colour, against the populist loud tones widens the appreciation horizon of her works beyond stereotypes.