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Yinka Ilori—artist, designer, North London resident—creates upcycled art, his ultra-colourful forms becoming park benches, chairs, playgrounds. The vibrant technicolor of his art suggests that the scaffolding of everyday life has untapped potential. Yinka himself, chatty, stylish, prolific, makes pieces that pay tribute to the Nigerian parables that formed him. Yinka told Semaine: “I was giving these objects new narratives that were inspired by my British and Nigerian heritage, bringing a different voice within my practice, and bringing an insight into my upbringing and my identity.” In so doing, his diverse forms hum with the vibrancy of inner life.

Yinka’s colourful upcycling has had Adidas, Kvadrat, Somerset House, and Selfridges come calling. The notion of reusing everyday objects came from his first visit to Nigeria: “I saw how people reused everyday objects as forms as seating; the idea that whatever they have has to last them for a long time. Whereas in London there’s this kind of fast paced way of thinking where trends and seasons change very quickly—we always want to catch up.” Yinka’s chairs became his vocabulary early on, almost as accident, for he is shy, and they are strong props: “Using chairs to tell stories is quite powerful, because I can create a narrative and tell a story within this object, and I can run away and leave this chair in a public space, and let the audience make their own assumption or interpretation of what they’re looking at.”

What Yinka then makes is a playground to his mind, but also a ladder to his childhood, his upbringing: “I celebrate both my cultures, within design, and give the audience an insight into my life, into my culture and I think to use the chairs was the first thing that I found to express that.” The colours and the forms themselves are designed with joy in mind. The same was true of the lessons learned in his childhood. What Yinka has done with his chairs and playgrounds is distilled the language of his youth into a palette.