Funmilayo
Digital Painting, 2025
Funmilayo—which means “Give Me Joy”—is a visual meditation on the weight and wonder of womanhood. At its center is a mother, cloaked in vibrant magenta, caught between weariness and resolve. Through swirling fabrics, fragmented faces, and rich, saturated colors, the piece explores the layered realities of being a woman, a daughter, a mother, and a vessel for generations.
This work grapples with the quiet ache of responsibility and the inherited burdens of gender and care, while simultaneously reaching toward joy—not as a destination, but as a quiet act of resistance and remembrance. Even amidst distortion and chaos, there is softness. There is beauty. There is becoming.
Funmilayo asks: What does it mean to reach for joy when the world demands so much of you? And how do we find peace, not in the absence of that weight, but in learning how to carry it with grace?