Wunika Mukan Gallery is proud to present Hypnagogia, a solo exhibition by Blossom Oyeyipo.

Developed during her four-month residency at the Nchedo Art Foundation, from September 2025 through January 2026, this body of work extends Oyeyipo’s three-year inquiry into orí, the Yorùbá understanding of inner essence, intuition, and self-direction, and its relationship to identity, agency, and visual poetics. The exhibition unfolds within the liminal terrain suggested by its title. Hypnagogia names the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, a state where images surface and the subconscious speaks in symbols.

The paintings and drawings emerge from Irin and the Garden of Dreams, a mythic framework through which the artist explores agency, fate, and the labour of becoming whole. Irin encounters her orí as a separate yet identical being. Through mirrored gestures, shared tasks, and symbolic trials, fragmentation gives way to alignment. Time loosens and space expands. Dream logic governs.

Rooted in a fictional universe she has authored, the works trace Irin’s journey through shifting landscapes of memory and imagination. Within this dreamscape, orí becomes both compass and companion. In Yorùbá cosmology, one chooses their orí before birth and forgets it upon entering the world. Life becomes a sacred process of remembrance. Oyeyipo renders this metaphysical return through narrative encounter and symbolic form.

Throughout the exhibition, physical environments function as metaphors. A mirrored garden suggests doubled consciousness. A swing becomes an instrument of cleansing. Monobloc chairs, familiar emblems of Nigerian domestic life, appear within jewel-toned landscapes. Their presence underscores the tension between the mundane and the metaphysical. The work of self-alignment unfolds in constant negotiation with everyday reality.

Materiality anchors this inquiry. Oyeyipo moves between the structural density of acrylic and the atmospheric delicacy of soft pastel, watercolour, gouache, and charcoal. Colour operates as psychic language, particularly luminous blues and saturated jewel tones that evoke interior depth. Through layering, repetition, and shifts between deliberate mark-making and diffused washes, meaning accumulates.

In Hypnagogia, the threshold becomes a site of integration. The exhibition records a merging, a moment when body, breath, and destiny align.

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