Shrines and Shrine Masters: D.O. Ebengho and Bruce Onobrakpeya: Brief Comparative Photo Essay and Research Funding Quest 1
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
A brief comparative study of two
masters of shrine art, D.O. Ebengho and Bruce Onobrakpeya, in the context of a funding quest to support novel studies of both artists.
Discursive Gaps
Their work exists in the highest ranges of the art of shrine construction across all cultures and periods, yet Ebengho's achievement, constructed over decades of work into his current age in his eighties, is yet to be referenced, talk less studied by anyone, while Onobrakpeya's creativity of more than sixty years and ongoing even as he reaches ninety, has not, to the best of my knowledge, been contextualised in terms of an extensive biography.
I aspire to take forward such a particularly impressive biographical work on Onobrakpeya as Simon Ikpakronyi's ''Bruce Onobrakpeya: A Wider Perspective'', in his edited Bruce Onobrakpeya: Footprints of a Master Artist, 2012, 1-124, published in relation to Onobrakpeya's 80th birthday, but which is a detailed essay rather than the expansive book that such a rich creative life as Onobrakpeya's requires to do it adequate justice.
Complementary Similarities and Differences between Ebengho and Onobrakpeya
Both Ebengho and Onobrakpeya are inspired by the
convergence of Benin and Yoruba spiritualities, and, with Onobrakpeya, Urhobo spiritualities, along with technological and other creativities. Ebengho is a priest practicing those spiritualities within a definitive tradition, his vision and skills developed within its traditional learning systems, even as he engages these ancient cultures in terms of his own distinctive orientations.
Onobrakpeya's priesthood, on the other hand, is secular and more individualistic, outside conclusive integration within any religious culture, even as it draws from various ones, evoking the sacred and the sublime through his engagement with a variety of forms and subjects, an orientation cultivated through the inspiration of the traditional cultures represented by such figures as Ebengho, cultures initially mediated to Onobrakpeya by his father who ''carved on wood to prepare materials for traditional worship'' as the artist states in his interview with Ola Babalola in Safy Quel's edited Bruce Onobrakpeya: Symbols of Ancestral Groves (1985, 21).
This foundational inspiration is reworked through Onobrakpeya's individuality, further cultivated through his own self development and his formal artistic training in the Western academy as developed in Nigeria.
''A shrine'', as Onobrakpeya may be paraphrased, the artist referencing Catholic priest Patrick Fitzgibbon's understanding of the concept of a shrine, ''is a focus for the sense of the sacred, a means of directing veneration through concretizing the abstract, placing the devotee in a mental state conducive to approaching the supra-sensible realities they are reaching towards.
My installations are inspired by shrines but are not devoted to deities in the conventional sense. They are akin to shrines in that they are means of giving form to the supra-real, directing attention to values beyond the mundane,'' my memory of Onobrakpeya's response in a personal conversation of fifteenth January 2023 to this essay comparing his work and that of Ebengho.
The pictures of Ebengho's art were taken by myself in early November 2022.
The sources for images of Onobrakpeya's work are indicated in the essay.
Research Logistics
My aspiration is to visit Onobrakpeya once a week at his house in Mushin, Lagos, to talk with him, as well as visit the Onobrakpeya Foundation premises and attend his annual artists retreat, the Harmattan Workshop, at his hometown Agbarha Otor, in Ughelli North Local Government Area of Delta State.
I intend visiting Ebengho once a month at his house/shrine at 2nd Cemetery Road, off Ehaekpen Street in Benin-City, to learn from him and members of his spiritual fellowship and his family about his work and their lives in relation to their spirituality and art.
Research Costs
A day's trip to Benin from my Lagos location costs about 28-30,000 naira or $40 at10,000 naira for transport to and from Benin, 10,000 for a day's stay at a hotel, 3,000 for food, and 5,000 for transport and miscellaneous expenses within Benin.
All contributions, at any level, will be appreciated. If any donor
so wishes, I shall not thank them publicly for their contributions. The amount
of all donations will be kept confidential. Donation details are avaiable at this link.
Discursive Gaps
Cosmological Vision between Ifa Hermeneutics and Ebengho's Shrine Construction