Omonosay | Indie Artist 🪴🦒

What We Made 🇳🇬 @artpartner

My submission for the Earth Partner Prize, 2026.

This work is a mixed-media painting. The painting examines poor waste management through the everyday experience of children growing up within an environment, Mpape, Abuja, Nigeria shaped by bad waste management and environmental neglect. Rather than representing ecological crisis primarily through images of catastrophe or destruction, I am interested in what happens when environmental problems become normalized.

One of the central questions I am raising through the work is: what does it mean for my generation and the generation after mine to inherit an environment shaped by waste? More specifically, what happens when children grow up in environments where poor waste management is part of their everyday reality?

The work therefore exists between two ideas: the resilience and creativity of children, i.e making recycled toys from discarded juice boxes and waste, and the responsibility of you and I, the adults, communities and systems to raise awareness on ecological issues that shape the environments we are inhabiting & the environment the younger generations are inheriting.

#earthpartnerprize2026