Culture defines the architecture of our inner landscape. Constructed on commonality, tapering from its base to its apex, its foundations are laid in what we were, while its heights are suggested by who we hope to be. An invisible blueprint, it imposes a perspective on the world we see, franking it with the stamp of familiarity, both reassuring and limiting.

Roots in the Sky, a group exhibition at Manchester’s HOME curated by and featuring Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, offers a seductive counter to the supposed verities of a European culture with the arrogance to regard itself as classical. In doing so, it affords space to traditions that were once traduced by colonialism. More pertinently, in cultivating their contemporary fruits, it goes some way to suggesting their rich lineages, a cultural genealogy whose traceries can be divined through their tributaries back to their source. As much as anything, it is this heritage, refracted through the distance imposed by migration that the pieces hold in common. Naturally enough, the expression of those roots is as various as the sensibilities responding to them.

From an Anglo-Irish perspective, Adeniyi-Jones’ work arrives heady with an atmosphere similar to the beguiling opening chapter of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray, albeit infused by the Harlem Renaissance artist Charles Cullen whose extant works in turn bring to mind something of the spare elegance of Aubrey Beardsley. Pearl White Dive swoons with languorous masculinity; floating, not drowning, in still, floral waters.

There’s a further suggestion of water, albeit deeper and darker, in Shaquelle Whyte’s Negro With A Library Card in which the subject studies, becalmed amid an engulfing inkiness, relieved only by a placidly indifferent cat. Importantly, perhaps, the central figure, convincingly realised in broad strokes of oil, appears either to be lit, or the light-bringer himself. As in the myth of Lucifer, with illumination often comes a refusal to serve.

Of a piece with the oceanic theme, Nengi Omuku’s mesmeric Sea Breeze, painted in oils on the traditional sanyan fabric of the Oruba people, seems to depict a threshold, not only between the land and the shore, but – in its almost visionary abstraction – the present, the past and the future. If time is a stream, it seems to imply, then to immerse oneself in it is to dissolve in the spirits of those who have gone before, moving forward through ourselves.

Marking a departure from this world of water, Jade de Montserrat’s cropped Torso: Candy Cane pulses with the energies of the unmistakeably feminine; the skin tattooed, or possibly painted, draws attention to the centre of its power. The markings read like self-realisation, but also an acknowledgement of connection and continuation as though the body is not so much separate from the rest of creation, but an expression of it. Whyte, too, portrays the body in the second of his pieces, although, despite the solidity of their muscular forms, the subjects of his Missing, either cropped like de Montserrat’s or turned away from the onlooker’s gaze, seem contrastingly vulnerable. The work is altogether more ambiguous; hauntingly so.

Coming full circle, however, it’s Adeniyi-Jones who fashions the last word in his titular Roots in the Sky. Almost gold, it seems to glow into the gallery. Its figures no longer suspended in water, but ascendant, moving towards the point where all that rise must converge. Like stained glass on canvas, it suggests the communion of dissolution.

Beyond strictures, it’s a persuasive invitation to join in.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main photo by Michael Pollard

 

Roots in the Sky is at HOME, Manchester until January 25, 2026. For more information, click here.