A bed is a medium item that, in an art context, can portray an array of different experiences, including sex, love, joy, rest, and sadness. In 1999, Tracey Emin stirred the art world by exhibiting her dishevelled bed for the Turner Prize. The installation, titled simply My Bed (1998), represented four days in the artist’s life where, during a bout of depression, she went without eating or drinking anything but alcohol. For Tracey, using the piece of furniture in her creation chronicled one of the darkest moments in her life, but for British-Nigerian artist Sola Olulode, it signifies something completely different.
Sola has painted Black queer couples in bed for around two years, as part of an ongoing Bed Series (also known as I love Sharing A Bed With You). In “Stitched To You” (2022), a pair wearing blue bonnets with content smiles across their faces sleep peacefully next to each other under floral bedding. Like much of Sola’s work, the piece highlights a moment of happiness and intimacy between a queer Black female couple.
“I’ve been looking at love and relationships in my practice for a while now,” Sola says. The 26-year-old British-Nigerian artist studied Fine Art at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2018. Since then, she says, her focus has been on creating work that feels personal to her, particularly the relationships between Black women and non-binary people.
Sola makes a conscious effort to illustrate a range of romantic dynamics in her paintings. The initial hopeful stages of a couple first falling in love, for example, such as in her hand-pulled screenprint, “Laying in the Grass” (2021), a piece that finds a couple relaxing on greenery next together. She later envisages the couple on a date and sitting down for a picnic; a rare idyllic image of queer existence. “The media often shows the negative side of being queer, and in fact, that's not our everyday experience,” Sola says. “There's a lot of beauty.” Her Bed Series is an extension of this idea.
While her work is currently on display at the Sapar Contemporary Gallery in New York, Sola also brought this series to life at 1-54, the international African art fair held at Somerset House in London last month. In it, she placed a large real-life indigo bed in the middle of London gallery Berntson Bhattacharjee’s exhibition space at the fair. She decorated the item with four Black women on the headboard and the outline of two others on the sheets, in a piece titled “Sleeping Deep In the Blue of Your Love” (2022). "This body of work demonstrates the breadth of Sola's practice, blurring the lines between fine art, textile and sculpture,” India Bhattacharjee, the director of the gallery tells me. “She challenges our preconceived notions of what an oil on canvas should look like."
