Cardboard, String, and Survival: Inside Lilian Orukwo’s Handmade Argument

Yinka Olatunbosun

There’s something quietly radical about Lilian Orukwo’s creative process.The radicalism isn’t in her subject matter alone. It’s in the materials she chooses, and in the unhurried, deliberate process by which she turns them into something worth hanging on a wall.

Orukwo, a Nigerian multidisciplinary visual artist and illustrator, based in the United Kingdom has a practice that spans across hand-drawn illustration, mixed-media fine art, and digital design. But it is the handmade dimension of her work that distinguishes it from much of what passes for contemporary practice today.

Every piece she produces carries a structure built entirely by hand, out of recycled cardboard and paper string; materials that have already lived one life before she gives them a new one. She cuts, wraps, gums and layers, constructing a protective mount that functions as part of the work rather than a frame around it. As she has put it, the mount isn’t a border but a part of the conversation.

That single distinction does a lot of work. It’s an argument, made without raising its voice, about what gets considered worthy of care and what gets discarded before it’s finished being useful. Contemporary art talks about sustainability constantly, usually as a concept to gesture at rather than a practice to inhabit. Orukwo skips the gesture and builds the idea into the physical fabric of every piece she makes.

This commitment to craft sits alongside a drawing and painting practice she’s developed over more than a decade of professional work. She moves fluidly between fine-line pen, acrylic and digital tools, letting each inform the others, treating the shift between hand-drawn tradition and digital production not as a compromise but as a creative position in its own right. The result is work that is technically versatile without ever feeling stylistically scattered. There is a coherence to it, a visual consistency that speaks to a practitioner who knows precisely what she’s trying to say.

Her craft is entrenched in her roots. Orukwo grew up in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria, and her visual language draws on the marks and symbols specific to her paternal community in Rivers State: forms that were originally worn as protection during conflict and which she has spent years transforming into a contemporary mark-making system that explores pride, belonging and beauty.

The marks have moved from skin to paper, from paper to structure, from structure to exhibition walls in London. And those walls have taken notice. What has become increasingly clear is that the visual language Orukwo has spent years developing is not confined to one medium or one context. It lives in her mixed-media canvases, in the colour palette that runs consistently across everything she makes, in her digital illustration work, and in the handmade objects that form part of her works. It is this cohesion that has begun to attract recognition across disciplines.

In 2025, D&AD New Blood, one of the world’s most respected creative industry organisations, selected her portfolio from a field of more than 800 international entries. That same year, the digital expression of her visual language earned a commendation at FIDA, the Fashion Illustration and Drawing Awards, celebrated internationally for excellence in fashion illustration.

In March 2026, The Other Art Fair London, presented by Saatchi Art and one of the leading platforms for independent contemporary art, became the space where the handmade, physical dimension of that practice met a live audience for the first time at this scale.

For a practice built in significant part from recycled cardboard and paper string, the trajectory is striking. But perhaps that is exactly the point. Orukwo’s work makes a case, gently, persistently, through the accumulation of handmade detail, that the materials we overlook and the cultural knowledge we risk forgetting are not liabilities to be managed but resources to be drawn on.

The protective marks that her community once wore on skin have become, in her hands, a physical structure built around the artwork itself, handmade from recycled cardboard and paper string, designed not as decoration but as protection.

That the same idea that began as a mark of survival has evolved into both a visual language and a structural principle running through every piece she makes is perhaps the clearest indication that for Orukwo, culture is not something she references. It is something she builds from, mount by mount, mark by mark, refusing to let anything that has already survived once be discarded twice.

And in a London gallery, under bright lights, a piece of cardboard that once carried someone else’s groceries now carries the weight of a people’s memory, wrapped, gummed and held together by hand, the way protection has always been offered: not as ornament, but as care made obvious, one layer at a time.