Lagos-based visual artist Blossom Oyeyipo is set to unveil Hypnagogia, a solo exhibition exploring the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, at Wunika Mukan Gallery from April 4 to April 25, 2026. The exhibition, developed during Oyeyipo’s four-month residency at the Nchedo Art Foundation (September 2025 – January 2026), brings together a body of work that charts an intimate journey through selfhood, memory, and the subconscious.
The title, Hypnagogia, refers to the transitional state between consciousness and sleep, a threshold where the boundaries of time, identity, and reality soften. Within this dreamlike terrain, Oyeyipo constructs a fictional yet psychologically resonant universe rooted in Yorùbá cosmology, where ori, the inner compass of personal destiny, serves as both guide and witness. Through painting and drawing, she renders life as a conscious process of becoming and remembering, where fragments of memory and symbolic thought converge.
Central to the exhibition is the exploration of duality and mirrored experience. Oyeyipo’s works depict encounters between parallel selves, expressed through repetition, fragmentation, and shared gestures. Throughout Hypnagogia, physical environments function as metaphoric extensions of the psyche. A mirrored garden evokes doubled consciousness, while familiar domestic objects—monobloc chairs, a swing—take on symbolic resonance, anchoring the work in the intimacy and cultural familiarity of Nigerian everyday life.
These elements underscore a tension between the mundane and the metaphysical, suggesting that acts of self-alignment unfold in relation to both inner worlds and external realities. Materially, Oyeyipo’s practice moves fl uidly between structure and atmosphere. Working across acrylic, soft pastel, watercolour, gouache, and charcoal, she builds compositions marked by luminous tonalities, particularly deep blues and saturated jewel tones, that evoke interior depth. Her process involves layering, repetition, and shifts between deliberate, precise mark-making and diffused, atmospheric washes. The result is work that accumulates meaning gradually, rewarding sustained looking and inviting viewers into a contemplative engagement.
Oyeyipo anchors her inquiry in the philosophy of ori, drawing on Yorùbá cosmology to frame identity as inherently connected to intuition, memory, and spiritual direction. In this worldview, one chooses their ori before birth, receiving it as a spiritual compass that guides the journey of life and the process of remembering one’s true path. Within Hypnagogia, ori becomes both narrative structure and conceptual framework, grounding the work’s exploration of destiny, agency, and psychological labour.
Rather than offering escape, the threshold in Hypnagogia becomes a site of integration. The exhibition builds toward a moment of convergence, where body, breath, and destiny align. What emerges is not dissolution but clarity: a steadier understanding of self, coming into focus, lighter and whole. Oyeyipo renders this metaphysical return through narrative encounter and symbolic trial, positioning the “Garden of Dreams” as a liminal space where the amnesia of birth is actively challenged through dream logic.
Hypnagogia invites viewers to slow down, to inhabit the in-between, and to witness the artist’s inquiry into what it means to remember, reimagine, and realign with one’s truest self. Through luminous imagery and layered symbolism, Blossom Oyeyipo offers a visual meditation on the complexity of becoming, one that lingers long after leaving the gallery.
