Shrines and Shrine Masters: D.O. Ebengho and Bruce Onobrakpeya: Brief Comparative Photo Essay and Research Funding Quest 3: Between Shango and Spires of Metal
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.
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 and costs are in part 1 of this essay and in the penultimate section of this one. Donation details are available at this link.
Here are part 1 and part 2 of this essay.
Discursive Gaps
Cosmological Vision between Ifa Hermeneutics and Ebengho's Shrine Construction
Stone, Calabash, Colour
One of the shrines of Ebengho's which I find particularly striking. I love the clash and harmony of colours, as red, white, grey and other luminosities converge in a rhythm both distinctive of each element and harmonious of their disparities.
What deity is this shrine dedicated to? What is the significance of the various components of this composition? Is the red of Shango, of lightning, thunder and justice evoked here, along with his stones of power? These are questions vital for unravelling the complex of meanings constellated by the grand structuration that is Ebengho's shrine complex.
Scope of Achievement of Ebengho and Onobrakpeya
In the centre foreground is Onobrakpeya's self created Ibiebe script. Below it are figurines, both humanoid and abstract, their enigmatic presence amplified by their gnomic character, a concentration of the mysterious into visual densities, contributing to the sense of an esoteric language projected by the scriptic shapes.
The vegetative forms constituting part of the shrine and close to which it is installed further evoke the sense of something created by a human being but operating in relation to the other-than-human, the primary suggestive resonance of this recreation of a style of Southern Nigerian shrine construction as a means of incarnating a sense of the numinous, perceptible but beyond full understanding, the sacred as both compelling and distancing through a sense of the uncanny, mysterious potencies testifying to the glory and wonder, the strangeness and power, of the universe.
Image from Quizlet.com
Circles of Exploration
Bones, plant fibres, graphic abstractions, within mutually reinforcing circles of opening and closing, of emergence and completeness, constitute this divination circle that is part of Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set construct.
The smaller and the larger circles amplify each other, as materials suggesting various forms of existence, plant and animal, a disparity unified by human creativity, converge in the evocation of coming into being evoked by the sense of otherwise empty space populated by diverse forms, like the opon ifa divination tray of Ifa, its likely inspiration, associations implying perhaps an exploration of the universe of value represented by ''the essences and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe'', as Wole Soyinka describes Yoruba Ijala poetry in Myth, Literature and the African World.
Onobrakpeya's oeuvre, his total body of work, is defined by an oscillation between relative smallness, as in this piece, and majestic size, experimenting with a broad diversity of materials, from the organic to the the technological, from print to sculpture, every creation of his dramatizing a sense of amazement at the creative possibilities enabled by the variety of forms constituting the cosmos as accessible to humanity.
His inspirational sources and his transformations of them range from vehicle spare parts afforded by his location in the commercial density of Mushin, Lagos, thick with motor spare parts dealers and their imposing assemblages of vehicle units, to the intricacies of shrine construction in the cognate Urhobo, Benin and Yoruba cultures, alive with a sense of peering into other dimensional spaces, sources extending from those contexts to evocations of the complex machinations of diverse technological structures.
This spectrum of sources is uniquely transmuted by the master, his creatively restless intelligence roaming across various intersections of the visible and the invisible, that-which-is and that which-is-yet-to-be, as perceived by himself, the dynamism of existence witnessed by everyone but galvanizing a few, those uniquely alive to the kinds of wonders Onobrakpeya is able to recognize in his Mushin neighbourhood, far from Lagos' upscale districts which he is economically powerful enough to live in if he chose to but preferring to remain in the commercial and human dynamism of Mushin, possibilities he also discerns in shrines far from the new respectablities of Christian churches that now dominate sacred space in Southern Nigeria, a traveller through the same universe as everyone else, but for whom each object, each creation of human ingenuity, goes beyond the mundane to radiate glorious possibilities revealed to all by his art.
Ebengho's work has not even been referenced by anyone before now, to the best of my knowledge. My research on his art is represented by the ongoing essay series ''Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr. D. O. Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine : Part 1'' and ''Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr. D. O. Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine : Part 2: Iroko Trees as Cosmological Coordinates'', along with various Facebook posts.
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Music, Colour, Form
Various artistic possibilities come together in the art of Ebengho and his shrine fellowship, from object installations to verbal and instrumental music and dance, in the context of ritual as art, convergences suggested by the sekere-multi-coloured beads around a gourd- that is part of this shrine construct.
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This image is an iconic evocation of Onobrapkeya's decades long rejuvenation of self and art, as the mature master, now 90, constantly generates new expressive styles, novel choices and reworkings of materials in terms of epic power at various scales, as suggested by this forest of metallic intricacies, far from the printworks for which he was known much earlier in his career, yet this newer expression suggesting the use of vertical forms evoking grandeur as evident in his explicitly shrine art, rich in exquisite detail, in creating an intersection of visual power and puzzling force emerging from the dissociation between the familiar presence of metallic constructs and the unusual patterns in terms of which they are configured.
Image from TripAdvisor