For Faderera Wahab, “home” is neither a fixed geographical location nor merely a domestic interior defined by comfort and familiarity. As reflected throughout her artistic practice, home appears instead as an emotional condition, continuously shaped and transformed through memory, ritual, material inheritance, and lived experience. In her recently concluded solo exhibition Home Is Where the Heart Is at AMP Gallery in London, Faderera explored how personal identity is gradually absorbed into, and shaped by, the surrounding spaces and objects through painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, and mixed-media installation.

Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and now based in the United Kingdom, Faderera works across painting, textiles, photography, and object-making. Yet she does not treat these forms as separate disciplines. Instead, her mediums exist in a state of continuous interweaving and mutual dialogue. Fabrics, beads, domestic objects, handmade inks, and layered material textures form part of her visual language, while also carrying traces of her cultural background.

This understanding of material as emotional expression becomes especially evident in one of the central works in the exhibition, Atunbi (Rebirth). Constructed from acrylic, repurposed fabrics, embroidery, linocut, wood, glass beads, and batik textiles, the work moves far beyond traditional painting, becoming closer to a construction of spatial psychology. Lace curtains partially obscure the composition, functioning both as decorative domestic material and as a symbol of psychological boundaries. The work never fully opens its internal world to the viewer. Instead, the audience is positioned as though peering through a narrow gap into an intensely private emotional space.

Faderera does not create warmth or nostalgia in the conventional sense through the image of family space. In Atunbi (Rebirth), the interior appears unstable, almost dreamlike. Sleep and insomnia become recurring psychological motifs, while fabrics and layered textures seem to accumulate emotion, memory, and inner tension.

The contrast between internal and external, hidden and revealed, runs throughout Faderera’s broader practice. Many of her works place the subject between visibility and disappearance, allowing identity to gradually dissolve into the surrounding environment. This is particularly visible in her paintings Radiance II and Pipedream. In these works, figures are situated within highly saturated environments, where the boundaries of the body become increasingly blurred. Colour exists not simply as atmosphere, but as emotion itself, while light assumes an almost spiritual presence.

In Radiance II, Faderera explores what she describes as the radiance of God existing within human essence, transforming light into a metaphysical force capable of dissolving the limits of the body. This spiritual charge given to material is central to her visual language. References to prayer, intuition, and divine guidance appear repeatedly throughout her work, yet they never become explicit religious doctrine. Instead, spirituality emerges as a gradual process through which images and materials are formed emotionally and intuitively, rather than through rigid planning.

Beyond painting and installation, Faderera’s sculptural objects further extend her exploration of how materials carry memory. This is particularly visible in her beaded bowl and vase series. Beaded Vase, for example, is inspired by the Yoruba percussion instrument Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀, traditionally made by wrapping a dried gourd with a net of beads. Rather than directly replicating traditional forms, however, Faderera reconstructs these cultural symbols through combinations of coral, jade, moonstone, agate, fossil materials, and Japanese antique vessels.

These objects exist within an ambiguous territory between sculpture, ritual object, domestic artefact, and cultural memory. Through the layering of different materials and cultural references, Faderera constructs a transregional visual language. Yoruba cultural memory intersects with contemporary collage methodologies, allowing these works to function not only as cultural symbols, but also as material archives.

The Image of One Not Yet Known

One of the most distinctive aspects of Faderera’s practice is her ability to move freely between different media. Rather than forcing painting, photography, textiles, or found materials to serve a single visual style, she allows each medium to retain its own expressive character. Home Is Where the Heart Is presents precisely this open condition. For Faderera, “home” has never been a fixed place, but the result of an ongoing accumulation of experiences, memories, and emotions.

Repeatedly used objects, inherited or repurposed fabrics, recurring dreams, spiritual reflections within everyday life, and emotional habits carried across geographical distances all contribute to an understanding of home as something fluid and continually formed. This attention to states of change and becoming also runs throughout many of her works.

In the photographic work The Image of One Not Yet Known, Faderera turns her attention to the emotional uncertainty that often accompanies the process of growing up. The work does not attempt to define a stable sense of self. Instead, it records a transitional state between the known and the unknown. As the title suggests, the subject is still in the process of formation, carrying traces of past experience while moving toward a future that has not yet fully emerged.

Growth, change, and self-understanding are presented not as completed outcomes, but as conditions that remain continuously in progress. In this work, photography becomes more than a medium for recording reality; it becomes a way of thinking about time and identity. Faderera is not concerned with a single decisive moment, but with emotional shifts and psychological states that are difficult to clearly define or name. Through photography, she preserves the subtle and complex feelings that accompany personal growth, transforming them into images capable of generating quiet resonance.

Ultimately, the work is not only about the artist’s own experience of growing up. It also touches on the shared uncertainty people experience when confronting change and re-examining their understanding of themselves.

Throughout the exhibition, Faderera’s materials appear to change over time while continuing to preserve memory. The domestic spaces she constructs provide not only intimacy, but also absorb emotional pressure. Her objects become ritual vessels, carrying fragments of identity, inheritance, and inner life. Through these intertwined relationships, her work suggests that identity does not exist solely within the body or consciousness. Instead, identity appears fragile and fluid, yet deeply embedded within the textures of human experience itself.