Hey, Ese here. My journey into the design world is anything but conventional. After 10 years of training and working in public health, I decided to find something that feels closer to my heart.
I began studying interior design in 2023 and was soon featured as a contestant on Season 6 of BBC’s Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr. I took to making ceramics for the first time on a 5-day ceramic workshop in 2024, and now split my creativity between interiors & ceramics. Studio Mind to Matter was born in 2025 out of a passion to infuse my cultural heritage into contemporary interior spaces.
Crafting sculptural stoneware ceramics using a combination of hand-building techniques, I creates vessels, lighting objects, and functional art for interior spaces, using the materiality of clay as a way of exploring identity and belonging, especially through the lens of my personal experiences.
Born and raised in Nigeria, with a sexuality that is culturally and legally forbidden, my experiences of feeling disconnected from myself led to resentment towards my culture and my identity. Through design & craft, I am finding ways to build healthy relationships with these parts of myself whilst trying to understand and interpret how people form identity and a sense of self whilst combatting external forces that tend to throw one into confusions of place and position.
Being an immigrant in Scotland, living here as a refugee, I am also exploring the process of formulating a new identity that blends my home cultural heritage with the Scottish culture I find myself face-to-face with today. With growing political and cultural tensions and power struggles between diverse groups, I use ceramics as a wat of understanding and interpreting my ideations on how cultures can blend, harmoniously, to form new, richer expressions rather than one supplanting the other; experiences similar and in direct correlation to colonial-era legacy which my home country is still reeling from.
Ultimately, I use ceramics to speak to my roots, identity expression and showcase the place of African art in contemporary design today. I create my work out of a community studio in Glasgow’s West End.