illustrator & textile artist
plantainchipss is a Nigerian non-binary lesbian artist living in Brooklyn, New York.
They spend their days blurring the boundaries of intimacy, grief, and childhood through digital media and textiles. As a survivor, they are passionate about exploring the exploitation and abandonment of victims of trauma, illustrating the ways these experiences shape the physical body and social positionality within our communities.
Survivorship is often an isolating lived experience full of shame and pressures, but prioritizing community care and material support allows us to move through the pain while experiencing the joy of chosen family and our own rebirth through healing. Their woven tapestries combine oral narratives and digital constructions to elucidate the ambiguous passage from surviving to experiencing genuine love and care for selfhood when words are not enough.
plantainchipss' art showcases movement through the universe in the physical and spiritual as a survivor, exploring the uncertainty of birth, childhood, and euphoria of life beyond. They take elements from their own life as a Black non-binary lesbian survivor and transform them into pieces that communicate the multifaceted experience of coming back to self, using bright colors, textiles, abstract patterns, and child-like whimsy. Their art embodies the point where multiply marginalized experiences converge: to see and be seen allows us to expand our imagination for a future of radical change, and they seek to form the bonds necessary for thriving within an antiblack, antisurvivor, apathetic culture that tries to keep us apart.
