Stories by candlelight

A studio visit with sculptor Funlola Coker

Funlola Coker, “The Gathering Place,” 2023. Photo courtesy the artist.

“All of the pieces that I'm making are based off of things that you can't necessarily remember,” said sculptor Funlola Coker when I stopped by her Boston Center for the Arts studio. “Things that you make up in your head and they're not quite real, they're a little bit surreal. They have that dreamlike quality to them.”

So it is with “The Gathering Table,” which sat in one corner of Funlola’s space. Made of foam, covered with a terra cotta-colored spackle, and drizzled with molten pewter gestures that might be eating utensils, or a half-familiar alphabet, or the ghosts of dinners past, the piece was inspired by her childhood gatherings around a low table in Lagos, Nigeria, where she listened to her brothers read stories by candlelight.

Funlola started as a jeweler and metalsmith, but she wasn’t happy with what she was making. In 2020, she went to grad school at SUNY New Paltz. There, “I started to feel like I am an artist. I wasn’t just fiddling around,” she said. “It felt necessary to my survival.”

Her work expanded into sculpture and installation in many craft mediums (touch is an anchor for her). The expansion continues: She is writing a mythic narrative, and working on developing a Yoruba alphabet based on the gestures made in the indigenous dance Bata. Installation, fiction, lexicon: “They don’t necessarily all have to work together at the same time or in the same way,” she said. “But I’m finding that they do.”

She recently won a 2024 Artadia Award, and will use the $15,000 to support her practice. There’s more about Funlola in this week’s Working Artist story in the Globe, and here’s a photo I took in her studio – her own pieces and inspirational objects, including textiles from Lagos, and a chart of her unfolding narrative on the wall.