Alex Nwokolo started his burnt wood installations in the mid-nineties – probably his most restless period as an artist. The early pieces were made of large, elongated wooden sticks that were both startling and intriguing.
The burnt wooden figures were a mix of the old and the new. The style and the stick figures recalled ancient cave drawings. Yet the presentation was contemporary and inventive. The artworks also combined serendipity and design – discarded sticks, burnt and reconfigured as figures, houses and locations.
He eventually started to explore the smaller, more intimate pieces using smaller wood figures in glass cases.
He stopped creating these installations for a while but has recently returned to them. The new artworks follow the same ideas as the installations from a decade or so ago. But they are more subtle, more nuanced. The stories are as interesting as before, but they are told more eloquently with the succinctness of an old storyteller.
The recent pieces are about village squares. The village squares represent ideas about community, responsibility and interconnections that have defined our culture over the years and may be disappearing or at least evolving to fit a more cosmopolitan reality.
The burnt figures may remind us of the past but the ideas and sensibilities they espouse a firmly in the present. They are elegant and compelling.
You can see the village square artworks here.