Like so many of Clay Space’s important collaborators and partnerships over the years, they’ve typically started with a person walking into the studio and asking a bunch of questions on how to make something. What’s even more amusing about our 4 years relationship with internationally renowned painter, Emmauel Osahor is that he landed up at Clay Space because two other studios turned him away!
Emmanuel came to us with the vision of making actual size, ceramic, birdbaths to accompany his paintings of garden scenes. We set to work throwing large bowls and stands, which could interlock and be assembled later. Emmanuel would then carve into them or apply decorations while the clay was still wet. We made holes in the basins so that a mini, rechargeable, water pump he had bought on Amazon (regrettably) would create little fountains. In total, we must have made close to a dozen fountains.
Once finished and installed, one would enter the gallery space where his large canvases would engulf you. Lush, green scenes of trees and hedges fill the room. They possess a Peter Doig, cinematic style. They’re almost like a memory of a picture. Depending on the venue, the birdbaths and some ceramic birds he had made, would be displayed alongside or in front of the paintings, giving the impression that you’re walking through these gardens.
Emmanuel’s To Dream of Other Places, Power Plant Gallery in April 2025
The work is about beauty and sanctuary. It is about green spaces, and it has been noted these are ‘domesticated lands’, so not quite nature. The work stands out to me in our era of art as conversation and analysis. He is not dissecting identity, nationality nor sexuality. He is not discussing income disparities nor unsettled historical grudges. He is also not taking unconventional materials and displaying them in art spaces. He asks his viewers to stroll through the gallery and be transported to these imagined spaces, as they are enveloped by lush gardens while the water in the fountains gurgles close by. If he is taking you to a place of beauty, I wonder where his camera lens is moving away from? Being forced to look at these images makes me wonder what is he not showing us? So while the work does not engage with identity politics, or any politics for that matter, it is invoked by its absence.
A friend once commented on the work of Anish Kapoor to me saying how refreshing it was to see a brown artist purely interested in shape, form and colour, basically hinting on the fact his work didn’t engage with identity at all. Though it was meant in gest, their comment speaks to a much bigger issue of marginalized communities and the art they are expected to produce. This expectation makes a big difference when it comes to receiving grants, commissions, awards, press coverage, teaching positions and the selling of their work. Personally, I think an artist’s identity is as relevant to their work as they choose to reveal;and as a public we should be careful what expectations we project onto the work and the artist.
Emmanuel has an impressive list of contemporary art spaces he has shown at, including SNAP Gallery 2016, the Art Gallery of Alberta 2021 and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in 2023. It was his solo exhibit at the Power Plant Gallery in April of 2025, To Dream of Other Places, which stood out to me. It was sublime, not just for the Power Plant’s standing as one of Canada’s more illustrious contemporary art spaces, but for the scale and scope of the project. The first hallway had many of Emmanuel’s drawings and paintings many of us who knew his work were used to seeing, but the hallway led to the main gallery space where floor to ceiling murals of gardens created a fully panoramic installation. As a viewer it was hard not to be moved by the impact of this painting. The icing on the cake, and a wink to Clay Space, were his water fountains at the center of the room encircled by custom made mosaic benches.
Emmanuel just opened his solo show at the Metivier Gallery on Saturday evening and will remain on display until November 7th.
About the Artist
Emmanuel Osahor paints fictional gardenscapes. They are lush and appear slightly wild, but Osahor takes care to remind us they are manmade spaces: a fence, a birdbath, or a plastic chair punctures an otherwise seemingly natural landscape. Osahor’s gardens function as metaphorical spaces, filled with imagined foliage and conceptualised from collaged photographs taken by the artist of gardens he has visited. In his constructed edens, wispy brushstrokes of pinks and powdery greens, blues and dusted purples, are punctuated by small and focused strokes of contrasting richer tones that create pockets of energy. Osahor paints them as mirages rather than as real life spaces: they are constantly just out of reach and appear as though they might melt away before our eyes, as quickly as they seem to have risen from the earth. In Osahor’s works the garden is transformed into a space for respite, a place within which the desire for utopia can be discussed, bringing forward the complexities of hope and failure that are inherent in utopic imagining.
Osahor holds an MFA at the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA in Art and Design from the University of Alberta (2015). His work has been presented in multiple solo and collective exhibitions, including at the Art Gallery of Alberta; SNAP Gallery, Alberta; the Works International Festival of Art and Design, Alberta; the Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario; and BAND Gallery, Ontario. In 2018 Osahor received an honourable mention at the 20th RBC Painting Competition and in 2021 he received the Joseph Plaskett postgraduate award in painting. In 2023, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto invited Osahore to create a multimedia exhibition at the museum. In 2025, Osahor had a solo exhibiton at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery entitled To dream of other places. Osahore is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Toronto.
