Between Solitude and Release: Inside Maureen Uzoh’s Practice

When Maureen Uzoh arrived in the UK from Nigeria, she felt a sense of freedom. It was filling up the streets she was walking on, the people she was talking to, and the spaces she was visiting. But something felt off. Something wasn't right. She came to this country, which was filled with opportunities yet also closed to her in some ways. Painting emerged out of necessity. She was creating spaces that were safe. That were protecting her. But that was also when the pandemic started and she lost her freedom once again.

As a way to reclaim her freedom, she began photographing herself and her loved ones in the intimacy of domestic spaces. From these documents of their existence, the series of yellow figures with balloon heads and blood-red backgrounds came to life. They seemed to echo how confined we all were within our own four walls and how fragile we had become. There was no joy in our postures. The clothes were the only elements that told our stories, small hints of personality or history. Everything else in Maureen's paintings was reduced to thinly sketched rooms where every silhouette remained in its place. It seems as if these spaces lost their meaning as they became our prisons.

The balloons, instead of human heads, in her paintings grew into a symbol that refused to stay still. They became a way of thinking about how we carry our fears and hopes in the thinnest of skins. One gives them life with a single breath. One loses them just as easily. For Maureen, this fragility was not sentimental. It was a truth she recognised in herself, in migration, in the long pandemic months when the world felt stretched too thin.

But when the pandemic ended, she wanted to let the symbol spill into real space. During her solo show with Hive Curates, balloons drifted around the gallery, as if the building itself had drawn a deeper breath. She invited visitors to write down whatever they regretted, what saddened them, what they never spoke about, what they wished for, and the memory they held so dear. The entire gallery became an artwork. It was a soft confessional, a place where vulnerability could float without judgment. 

After the success of that experiment, she decided to push the idea further. She removed the paintings entirely and took the balloons to public spaces. She wanted to see what could happen when the work goes back to where it came from - to the real world. The participation was different. This time, it was the uncertainty that became an artwork. This time the balloons had somewhere to escape to. They didn't get back to the artist. They stayed with the authors of these confessions or just drifted away. 

Maureen's practice gathers all these tensions. She loses and gives them freedom. As she mentions, her finished paintings are not the real artworks. The process. The confession. The conversation. They are the artworks. In her work, she offers the audience the opportunity to let go while also reminding us to cherish what we have. Because, like her balloons, our lives are fragile and can disappear the second we look away.