To Have and to Hold: Benjamin Philip

The Kaduna Fashion and Art Festival (KAFART) is back this year for its 6th overall edition and 1st edition as a biennial. The theme is “To Have and to Hold.” We had earlier spoken to the festival director, Ganiyat Sani, about what this edition promises. We spotlight some of the exhibiting artists and designers, asking them questions about their creative origins, their distinct interpretations of the theme, and how their heritage and local communities shape the narratives they choose to preserve against the threat of erasure.

Take us back to where your relationship with art began. What are your earliest memories of making, and who or what first made you feel that creating was something you could do, and perhaps needed to do?

My relationship with art began as a child who was born and brought up in a community with access to clay materials . I always enjoy playing with clay , trying to create things I see daily with my hands .it was a feeling I could not always name. I was drawn to making things before I fully understood why. When words felt too limited, I turned to images, colour, and form. Creating gave shape to thoughts and emotions that were difficult to explain directly.

That instinct stayed with me as I grew older. Eventually, it became more than a private interest and led me to study Fine and Applied Arts at Ahmadu Bello University. My training helped me understand materials and develop discipline, but the deeper reason I make still comes from that early need to express what I cannot always say.

Today, I think of art as a language I return to when I am trying to understand myself, my memories, and the world around me. I do not believe every feeling has to be explained in a sentence. Sometimes it needs to become a colour, a mark, a face, or a presence on a surface. That is what keeps me creating.

This year’s theme, “To Have and to Hold,” asks what we choose to hold, what we let go, and the cost of holding on. When you first sat with those words, what did they stir in you, and how do they show up in the work you’re bringing to KAFART?

When I first heard the words To Have and to Hold, I immediately thought about the things we carry quietly. I thought about memories that return without warning, emotions we keep private, relationships that continue to shape us, and cultural identities that remain with us even when our surroundings change.

The phrase felt tender to me, but it also carried weight. To hold something can mean protecting it, loving it, or keeping it close. It can also mean carrying pain, fear, or an experience we have not yet learned how to release. I have known moments when holding on gave me strength, and other moments when I realised that the same thing was keeping me from moving forward.

That tension appears in the work I am bringing to KAFART. The pots, bodies, cracks, and layered forms suggest both protection and burden. They ask what we preserve, what we inherit, and what happens when something we have carried for a long time begins to change us.

For me, the theme is about the space between possession and release. It is about recognising that what we hold can shape us, but it does not always have to define where we are going.

Tell us about the piece, or body of work, you’re exhibiting. What is the story behind it, and what do you hope someone feels or understands when they stand in front of it?

For KAFART 2026, I am presenting three works: What the Clay Remembers, The Body Is a Vessel, and She Carried Us.

The works grew from my thoughts about the objects and images that stay with us from childhood: clay pots, food, the presence of women in domestic spaces, and the quiet ways knowledge is passed from one generation to another. A pot can look ordinary, but it can hold nourishment, memory, labour, and family history. It can be handled every day and still carry the imprint of the people who used it before us.

In What the Clay Remembers, I use the broken pot to think about the parts of history and identity that remain after something has been damaged or lost. A broken vessel is no longer whole, but it still tells us that it once held something. Its cracks become evidence of survival rather than simply signs of failure.

The Body Is a Vessel came from thinking about the body as a place where experience is stored. We carry memory in our gestures, posture, faces, and in the ways we respond to the world. The pot-like forms connect the human body to the idea of holding, containing, and carrying.

In She Carried Us, I focus on the woman as a bearer of life, culture, memory, and responsibility. I think about the women who preserve traditions through ordinary acts: preparing food, telling stories, caring for children, keeping objects, and repeating knowledge that may never be written down.

These works connect to To Have and to Hold because they ask what we carry and what we are responsible for preserving. When viewers stand before them, I hope they recognise something familiar—not necessarily a specific object, but the feeling of receiving something from the people who came before them. I hope the works make them think about their own inheritance and the stories that might continue through them.

Take us through how your work comes to life, from the first spark of an idea to the moment you know it’s finished. Which materials, rituals or habits are essential to you, and is there anything about your process that would surprise people? 

My process usually begins with something small that refuses to leave me alone: an image, a memory, a question, or an emotion that keeps returning. Sometimes I begin with a clear idea, but often I only know the feeling I want the work to carry. I start there and allow the image to develop gradually.

I work with pastel, charcoal, and acrylic, depending on what the idea requires. Pastel allows me to build colour slowly, layer by layer, and create softness, dust, and texture. Charcoal gives me a different kind of freedom. I can make a strong mark, create deep shadows, or remove part of the image and let the surface show through. Acrylic helps me establish areas of colour and structure when I need something more direct and solid.

I spend a lot of time looking at the work from a distance, then moving close to examine a small area. I add, erase, soften, sharpen, and rebuild. Sometimes I remove a section that took a long time to make because it is making the work too obvious. I am interested in leaving room for the viewer, so I do not always resolve every detail.

What may surprise people is how much of the process involves waiting and looking. I can spend a long time doing very little visibly while deciding whether an image needs another mark or whether it needs space. I know a work is finished when it begins to hold its own meaning—when the elements are speaking clearly and any further change would weaken rather than deepen the conversation.

KAFART asks what endures in the face of erasure and forgetting. Is there a story, tradition, skill or memory from your culture, family or community that you feel is at risk of being lost, and how does your work help you hold onto it?

What concerns me is the possibility of preserving the appearance of a tradition while losing the story inside it. We may continue to recognise a pot, a pattern, a food, or a familiar form, but forget who made it, why it mattered, and what kind of knowledge it carried.

I think about the everyday objects connected to home and family life—especially vessels used for food and storage. They are easy to overlook because they are part of ordinary routines, but they often hold memories of care, labour, and continuity. A pot can remind us of the hands that prepared food, the people who gathered around it, and the knowledge passed through those repeated acts.

I am also interested in the quiet skills and stories carried by women. Much of this knowledge is transmitted through watching and doing rather than through formal teaching. Someone learns by standing nearby, helping, listening, and eventually taking responsibility. If those moments disappear, an important part of our history can disappear with them.

This is why I use African forms and cultural references as more than decoration. I want them to remain connected to questions of identity, belonging, memory, and responsibility. My work does not try to freeze culture in the past. Instead, I want to carry these images into the present and allow them to speak in a new visual language.

For me, making art is a way of keeping a memory active. It is not only about looking back; it is also about asking what we will pass on and what future generations will understand from what we leave behind.

What does it mean to you to show your work at KAFART, and how has your community, your city and the way you grew up shaped the way you see and make?

Showing my work at KAFART feels meaningful because I am bringing these personal reflections into a space shaped by artists from Northern Nigeria and beyond. I am not presenting the work in isolation. It is entering a conversation with other people’s memories, histories, and ways of seeing.

Northern Nigeria has influenced me through its mixture of tradition, movement, history, landscape, and changing everyday life. The things around me—the forms of buildings, the colours of the environment, the objects used at home, and the relationships between people—have all contributed to the way I notice and interpret the world.

I am especially drawn to the stories held in ordinary things. A familiar object can carry a sense of place, even when it is removed from its original setting. That awareness has shaped my interest in African identity and in the emotional meanings attached to objects, bodies, and cultural forms.

Studying Fine and Applied Arts at Ahmadu Bello University gave me the technical foundation to explore these ideas more deliberately. It also exposed me to different ways of thinking about art and helped me understand that personal experience can become part of a wider visual conversation.

For me, KAFART is not only an opportunity to display finished works. It is a chance to meet other artists, listen to different perspectives, and see how my own work changes when it is encountered by people outside my studio. I am contributing my voice, but I am also arriving ready to learn.

What is the work you haven’t made yet that excites you most, and what do you hope people carry with them after experiencing your work at KAFART?

The work that excites me most is the work I have not yet discovered. I want to keep moving beyond what is familiar to me and make pieces that combine abstraction, human emotion, African cultural references, and symbolism in ways I have not tried before.

I am interested in creating work that reveals itself slowly. I want someone to notice one image at first, then find another relationship or meaning after spending more time with it. I do not want to explain everything immediately. I would rather create a space where the viewer can bring their own memories and questions into the work.

After KAFART, I hope people carry away more than an impression of colour or form. I hope a particular image stays with them—a crack in a vessel, a face, a body, or the feeling of something being carried. Perhaps the work will remind them of someone who raised them, a tradition they have inherited, or a memory they had almost forgotten.

I do not need every viewer to arrive at the same interpretation. I would be happy if the work leaves them with a feeling, a question, or a memory that continues to return.

I want my art to remind people that we are all shaped by what we carry. Our stories may be different, but the need to remember, belong, protect, and be understood connects us.