Sanctuary of Nature at BAFA 2026: My Work at the Bradford African Festival of Arts

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What the Bradford African Festival of Arts actually is

BAFA is six days of African arts and culture built around one idea: that African creative work in Britain deserves a serious platform rather than an occasional guest slot at somebody else’s event.

The 2026 edition brings together artists, performers, filmmakers, academics, entrepreneurs and communities across live music, dance, theatre and spoken word, curated art exhibitions of both traditional and contemporary work, panel discussions with artists and policymakers, and business sessions on the creative economy and cross-cultural trade. The opening ceremony and cultural workshops took place on Monday 3 August at the University of Bradford.

The detail I keep coming back to is the funding. BAFA 2026 is supported by Arts Council England using public money from the National Lottery. That matters more than it sounds. African arts festivals in Britain have historically been run on goodwill, personal savings and volunteer labour — brilliant, exhausting, and structurally fragile. Public investment changes the arithmetic. It means the work can be curated properly, artists can be treated as professionals rather than favours, and the thing can plausibly happen again next year.

That is the difference between a celebration and an institution. I have exhibited at both kinds. The second kind is what actually builds careers.

Nkosoo: the theme, and why it changed how I read my own picture

This year’s theme is Nkosoo — an Akan word meaning advancement and progress.

My first reaction, honestly, was that my photograph did not fit. Sanctuary of Nature is not a picture about progress. It is a picture about hiding. It came out of fear, and it holds still rather than moving forward. When I saw the theme I wondered whether I had submitted the wrong work.

I have changed my mind since, and the reason is worth setting out. Progress is not only forward motion. Anyone who has actually rebuilt something — a career, a family, a life in a country that was not the one they were born in — knows that advancement has a prerequisite, and the prerequisite is somewhere to stand. You do not advance from a state of pure panic. You advance from shelter. First you find the place where you can breathe, and then, from there, you move.

Read that way, a picture about refuge is not the opposite of a picture about progress. It is the first half of it. Nkosoo asks what advancement looks like, and one honest answer is: it looks like the quiet moment just before, when you found somewhere safe enough to think.

That is what I hope the work says in that hall, surrounded by paintings, textiles, film and performance that are all pushing in the same direction from different angles.

Sanctuary of Nature: an eye, wet leaves, and a question I could not put down

The image is a human eye, close and alert and alive, framed by wet green leaves with water still sitting on them. The eye peers through. The leaves hold.

It started with the pandemic, though not only the pandemic. I was thinking about COVID-19, and before it Ebola, and the pattern of collective fear that has shaped so many lives across the two continents I call home. I kept asking what it looks like when an entire global population is frightened at the same time, all of them searching for somewhere safe at once.

The answer I kept arriving at was nature. People walked. People sat in parks and gardens. People put their hands in soil. The natural world became the one thing that stayed indifferent — indifferent to the virus, to the news cycle, to the borders closing all around us. There was something steadying in that indifference.

So I made a photograph about protection. About the way proximity to the natural world can feel, in the right moment, like being held by something older and larger than any human fear. Not escape — there is no escape from grief or disease or uncertainty, and I did not want to pretend otherwise. Shelter. A place to breathe differently.

I wanted the eye to look like it was watching, because watching is what we were all doing: scanning the horizon for a sign that things were shifting. And around that watchful eye, life simply carried on. The leaves were green. The water was fresh. Something was still growing.

From a London brick wall to a Bradford hall

Sanctuary of Nature has had a longer life than I expected of it.

It first went on a wall in February 2025, at Boomer Gallery near Tower Bridge, in the fifth edition of their open exhibition Dreams and Nightmares. More than 2,000 artists submitted; 200 were selected. I was in twice, with this piece and with Stillness in the Storm. I have written about what that selection felt like in my post on the Boomer Gallery show, and the honest answer was relief rather than triumph — the relief of someone outside your own head confirming that the work landed where you aimed it.

Standing in front of it in the gallery, I saw things I had missed in the file. Scale changed the texture of the leaves. Gallery lighting caught the wetness differently. The eye, at that size, in that room, had a presence that genuinely surprised me. That is the transaction a gallery makes possible: the picture stops being only yours and becomes partly the property of whoever is standing in front of it.

2026 has taken it further — a summer of exhibitions across England, and now Bradford. A photograph made in isolation, about isolation, has spent the year in rooms full of people. I am aware of the irony and I am not complaining about it.

Why an African arts festival in Bradford matters

Bradford is not an accident of geography here. The city was named UK City of Culture 2025, chosen from a record twenty initial bids ahead of County Durham, Southampton and Wrexham, and it has spent the year since working out what happens when the title ends.

The answer, so far, is roughly £2.5 million of continuation funding — £1.5 million from Arts Council England and a further £1 million from National Lottery heritage and community funds — aimed at keeping the infrastructure alive rather than letting it evaporate the moment the bunting comes down. Coventry’s 2021 year attracted £172 million of inward investment, so there is a real precedent for what sustained cultural attention does to a place.

A festival like BAFA is exactly what that legacy should look like in practice. Not a one-off spectacle, but a recurring platform in a city with deep, long-established African and Caribbean communities, hosted by a university, funded publicly, and open to the public.

It also matters to me personally. I work between London and Leicester and I show in London galleries, and there is a quiet assumption in this country that serious contemporary art happens within about four miles of the Thames. It does not. Some of the most interesting audiences I have met have been outside London, in rooms where people are not performing sophistication and will simply tell you what they think of your picture.

The same eye, whether it is a gallery wall or a wedding aisle

People ask whether the fine art and the wedding photography are two different jobs. They are not. They are one practice under different conditions.

The attention that makes Sanctuary of Nature work — waiting for the light to do the right thing, watching until the real moment arrives instead of manufacturing a fake one, composing so an image survives being looked at properly rather than scrolled past — is the same attention I bring to a wedding in Leicester or Lagos. The fine art work built that eye. The documentary work sharpened it, because nothing teaches you to find an image inside chaos like photographing people in situations you do not control.

It runs the other way too. Twelve years of weddings taught me to read a room quickly, to notice who is about to cry before they do, and to be in position early rather than reacting late. That is not a separate skill from making a photograph about fear and refuge. It is the same skill.

A photograph earns its place the same way whether it hangs in a gallery in Bradford or lives in a family’s album for fifty years: someone has to still want to look at it. You can see where the two halves meet in the Aworan collection, and in the client galleries from this year’s weddings.