Something inside him, Segun Victor Owolabi recalls, unravelled. This was the moment the Obi of Onitsha, Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe, Agbogidi—standing onstage at the International Conference Centre auditorium at IMT, Enugu—announced his name as winner of the Elder K.U. Kalu Prize for Young Artist of the Year, the top award at the Life in My City Art Festival (LIMCAF). Valued at the naira equivalent of $2,000, the prize recognised his textile work “Entanglement: Sad Generation with Happy Faces.”
It was October 25, LIMCAF’s grand finale. The announcement—slow, theatrical, suspense-heavy—felt to him less like surprise and more like fulfillment. “The first thing I felt was gratitude,” he says over WhatsApp. Then came the tears—not dramatic, but quiet and involuntary. “Human emotions are funny,” he muses. “Sometimes you laugh at the peak of sadness and cry at the peak of happiness.” The tears weren’t for the money or title but for the context: everything he had endured earlier in the year rising to the surface unbidden. All he could do was let the tears fall. He was overwhelmed, and profoundly happy.
Talking about that victory, one senses he views it less as luck and more as correction. For the Ilorin-based thread artist whose mind bends toward mathematics and whose temperament is shaped by solitude, LIMCAF was the culmination of years of small, disciplined decisions that gradually stitched themselves into inevitability.
The shift began months earlier, during the LIMCAF residency in Enugu. It was, he insists, “the best thing that happened to me”—not because it guaranteed visibility but because it challenged a long-standing habit: his devotion to monochrome. Before Enugu, he worked almost exclusively in black-and-white, a stripped palette that mirrored his ascetic attachment to precision. The residency nudged colour into his hands. Once colour entered, it refused to leave.
His newly vibrant pieces debuted at the Amadeo Business Summit exhibition in Enugu and sold quickly. That sale—unexpected and affirming—marked a turning point. “Before the grand finale, I already felt I had won,” he confides. “I had proven something to myself.”
The prize also tied off a thread dating back to 2021, when he first entered LIMCAF—the postponed 2020 edition—with “Resilience”, his meditation on surviving the pandemic. “Anyone who lived through 2020 came out different,” he reflects. Back in school at Ahmadu Bello University, he had declared to his coursemates that he intended to win the overall prize—earning laughter in response. He didn’t win that year, though he later learned he had almost done so through a clerical accident. “If it had gone through, I’d have taken the overall best by accident,” he says. Instead, he won something subtler: a ticket to the Dak’Art Biennale.
Dakar reshaped him. The Biennale exposed him to artists who carried themselves with the quiet certainty of people who no longer apologised for ambition. Returning to Ilorin, he made himself a promise: he would not re-enter LIMCAF until he was ready. He waited four years.
By 2025, readiness had ceased to be a hope and had become a fact. He walked into the competition with a calm that bordered on prophetic. “You are the winner until it is announced otherwise,” he kept telling other finalists. It was less bravado than worldview.
Thread—his signature medium—was never a planned direction. It was necessity. Oil paint triggered severe allergies; acrylics were no better. He needed a material that would not betray him. Thread, with its paradoxical mix of fragility and structure, emerged as the answer. “Thread is timeless,” he says. “Individual strands are weak, but together they become powerful.” The metaphor suited him, almost eerily: a life pieced together from elements that once felt tenuous on their own.
His introduction to thread art came through Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Cheng. They exchanged messages; he admired Cheng’s mathematically driven work. Then communication ceased. “Honestly, the silence pushed me deeper,” he recalls. Abandonment became instruction. He reverse-engineered what he saw, learned the geometry beneath the form, and discovered that Mary Everest Boole had explored similar mathematical principles in the 19th century. Unwittingly, he had stepped into a lineage.
Colour arrived later, thanks to a simple suggestion from Professor Philip Gushem: “Bring colour into it.” At first, it felt like sacrilege. But once colour entered, it rearranged his entire visual world.
His influences form a constellation rather than a lineage—Cheng, Petros Vrellis, Tatyana Abakumova, and Boole historically; Dr Ayo Adewunmi and El Anatsui in the present. What he admires in them is not only artistic discipline but moral scaffolding. “They embody the mindset and generosity I hope to cultivate.”
Thread art, as he practices it, is not a trick of geometry. It is a worldview made tactile. Up close, his works appear chaotic—tangled lines, crossings, confusions. Step back, and the frenzy resolves into coherence. “That’s exactly how life works,” he says. “Up close, things look chaotic. But from the right distance, they align.” His mission is to help viewers “see alignment in their entanglement”—a philosophy shaped not in theory but in childhood.
He grew up bullied for being “different,” a vague accusation that nonetheless defined his early years. Teachers punished him for drawing in his exercise books; classmates mocked his quietness. He retreated inward and drew. “Bullying pushed me into isolation. Isolation pushed me into creativity.” Art became the one space that demanded nothing except honesty. It held him, built him, rebuilt him. His thread pieces today—fragile strands pulled taut into coherence—are stitched versions of his own resilience.
The COVID year deepened this trajectory. Restless indoors, he fell into computational aesthetics: algorithms, geometric permutations, pattern as narrative. Dan Brown’s Origin introduced him to a question that still animates him: when a machine produces algorithmic art, who is the artist? “The programmer,” he argues.
“His thoughts go into the computer and thus create the work.” This fusion of mathematics, code, and thread culminated in works like Blinded by Sight, a geometric meditation on the unreliability of human vision and the primacy of inner awareness.
Fresh from winning two major prizes in one year, Owolabi is expanding his ambitions. “My goal is to see how far this thread technique can go,” he says. “To challenge what seems impossible.” He is building a future in which thread art is pushed past its current boundaries.
Winning LIMCAF, then, felt like a circle closing. The bullied child, the solitary draughtsman, the computational experimenter, the colour convert—all converged. “As far as LIMCAF is concerned,” he says evenly, “I truly feel like the Artist of the Year.” And perhaps that is the real story: an artist who has learned that life—like his work—resolves into clarity only when one steps back far enough to see the pattern.
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