Bunmi Agusto holds a paracosm in her mind that she has named ‘Within’. This world exists as a macro-reflection of her own interiority and is subsequently a site for her explorations of psychology, cultural theory and the evolution of selfhood through the lens of fantasy. Her works on paper depict otherworldly, allegorical lives of humans, hybrids and ghosts in this sentient, braided landscape of Within. She combines drawing, painting and printmaking to create bold, intricate images with underlying geometric compositions that draw from West African aesthetic histories embedded in her cultural consciousness. Below is a short excerpt from the artist about this world in her mind:

“The genesis of Within began with my birth. My father’s people —the Yorubas— do not name their children until the seventh day. I was named Olubunmi on my seventh day, but for my first week of life, I was a nameless alien thrust into a new existence. This alien, I now call Ó, was born a compound of past lives and ancestral coding. As I went on to live this new life of mine as Olubunmi, Ó retreated into the deep crevices of my mind and built an entire world I now know as ‘Within’. This is a world where skin becomes clay and strands of hair grows from its pores. I, Olubunmi, was unaware of this world for the first twenty years of my life until I accidentally stumbled through a portal in my mind when meditating and met Ó. By combining strands of our hair, Ó and I created eight braided cocoons in which eight hybrid beings grew and were born into Within and thus became the first indigenous peoples of the world. Each hybrid was born in my image but Ó’s alien gene activated different mutations in each of them. The hybrids were the primary residents of Within alongside Ó after my first visit. However, the portal I stumbled through remained open and people from my waking life began to be subsumed into my mind and into Within. Sentient perceptions of family members, friends and passersby became cross-reality migrants in the fantastical landscape. Now, Within is an ever-evolving complex repository for all that I encounter. As Within evolves, strands become braids, clay becomes structures, families become clans, gossip becomes history, and predecessors become gods. I only get to see this evolution in fragments when I visit the world in my daydreams.”