Where Waste Becomes Art: The Art Pieces By Oladejo Sisters

Introduce yourself and tell us how you ventured into creating this type of art.
My name is Abiodun Aminat Oladejo, and I’m Ramota Oladejo. Yes, we are sisters. We signature our art pieces as Oladejo sisters.
We started as fashion designers, and we upcycle waste. We make a new product from fabric waste. We pack fabric from tailors shop, weave it in a traditional form, and make it into shoes and bags. That’s how we started.
Do you have a fashion design background?
No, we are actually fashion designers, we both learned, and work with the machine, and at the end of each day after work we’ll pack a sack full of fabric waste to trash. And so, one day we thought that this stuff we were trashing didn’t make sense.

So, who made the decision?
We both decided it together. Yeah, so we felt like what if we can come up with something like this, instead of trashing this stuff? Why not turn it into something useful, rather than polluting the environment?
Yeah, we happen to be working in a fashion industry, in which what we do is poor production, we saw that in a week we can throw away a sack of fabric-cut cloth. We now said rather than throwing these fabrics away, can we just try to think of something creative to do about it? So that is how we started this art. As you can see this map of Africapatterns, is made from the different fabric of Ankara.

Before this do you consider yourselves artistic or have a flare for art?
Yeah, we have a personal passion for arts, so it’s just how personal, it just comes naturally.
Its starts with deep thinking. The idea comes to our mind and then we entertain a lot of ideas, so after that, we seat together and discuss it. then we start to think of a creative way to implement that idea, and process such an idea.
Well, we used to have a science background. In our secondary school days, we were both in the science department. We even proceeded to study statistics during ND days.

Are you twins? Explain your deep connection.
We are not twins, we are sisters, and we have like-interest. The age gap is 3 years.
We studied statics at the federal school of statistics in ajibode, Ibadan. We are presently students at the national open university of Nigeria at Ibadan. I study mathematics (Abiodun) I study statics (Ramota).
You know as we keep growing, our values tend to change. Let me say less than 3 years ago, something happened to us I’m not ready to share that now, but it changed our interest.

Regarding the exhibition of your works, is this the first?
This is our 2nd exhibition. We had our first exhibition at continental hotel during the academy for women entrepreneurs in 2020.
I got selected for the women entrepreneurs in 2020, so it’s a life-changing experience for both of us. Even though I was the one who got selected, we took the classes together, we did a lot together. So during the in-person program, I learned that there would be room for exhibit waste and was wowed by that.
We’ve been trying a lot of crafts, we can do so many things we can make adire, we can sow, we were just working but not showing it out there. Doing it and keeping it. The exhibition was an opportunity for us to show our work.
We’ve been doing it for less than 2 years. We just barely started.