Personal Legends through Quilting with Omo Iserhienrhien

Omo is a Nigerian/Guyanese/Canadian Artist and Space Designer with a wide range of creative and technical experience in creating beautiful and meaningful spaces. With a natural passion for visual arts she received her degree in Interior Design from Ryerson University. This has launched her career as a Residential and Commercial designer who is adaptable in designing for retail, hospitality, entertainment, corporate spaces, productions, art exhibitions and other experiences for clients. 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. Unfortunately Nigeria has lost some of these crafts to a brutal colonial past (See the fall of the Benin Kingdom). As well as the loss of a textile industry to the industrialization of the 1960s which moved the textile industry to the likes of Hungary and China. 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.