In Conversation: Omo Iserhienrhien, Delali Cofie and Moraa Stump

Omo Iserhienrhien is a Nigerian/Guyanese/ Canadian Artist and Space Designer with a wide range of creative and technical experience in creating beautiful and meaningful spaces. Omo has a deep need to connect with her African and Caribbean history and community through her work and often dreams up projects for storytelling through textiles.

Over the past few years she has been designing textiles and objects that are acts of ritual but also tell a deeper meaning of her Nigerian culture and ancestral past. The African Diaspora, specifically West African has a rich history of craft which when highlighted creates a dialog between our past and future. Omo sees many links between how Nigeria in specific has had to reinvent itself over and over again in order to preserve its art. As well as how her own identity as a first generation Canadian can design for cultural permanence. Omo often depicts altar spaces with her large scale installations as a means of making sense of place and our own identities.

Delali Cofie is a Ghanaian-Nigerian photographer currently living and studying in Toronto, Canada. Through storytelling he engages in multiple genres of photography, such as fashion, documentary and fine art, often blurring the lines between them. 

His personal work seeks to highlight beauty whilst exploring social-political issues, taking inspiration from the human experience, both of his and those around him. Frequently creating work between his native city Accra and current city Toronto, his work tells a tale of two cities, linked by a diasporic thread. His latest work brought him home to Ghana, working with local communities to create traditional costumes using dyed fabrics and natural fibers such as Raffia.

Moraa Stump (Toronto) is a Canadian and Kenyan artist and maker. Moraa spent her formative years growing up in Tanzania, Mozambique and eSwatini which informed her interest in how physical spaces inform one’s sense of individual identity and belonging. Through sculpture and installation, using found and repurposed materials, Stump juxtaposes senses of the familiar, comfort and the mundane, with the complexities of marginalization and sometimes terror experienced by Black bodies. Currently, Moraa is exploring these themes through piecing materials, based off of research into quilts in historically Black communities in Southern Ontario, with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Moraa earned her BFA in Material Arts from OCAD University, Toronto (2021) and has since presented solo installations and group exhibitions in Canada and the United States. She is featured in private collections in the United States, Canada and Ghana. In 2021, she was accepted as an Artist in Residence at the Harbourfront Centre, Toronto.

Destinie Adélakun is a self-taught artist born in Lagos, Nigeria, raised in Nagpur, India, currently living and working between Toronto and New York City. Her work explores the themes of pre-colonized African/Indian history, mythology, religions, and spirituality in the forms of photography, film, paintings, and sculptures. She utilizes individuals in her work personifications of principles and re-illustrated African and Indian mythological tales. She celebrates women of the African and Indian diaspora and plays with adornment that embodies the creative direction of the work.