Stella Ekpe's practice sits within a living network of memory, identity and inheritance, where the body and the home become parallel archives of lived experience. Working from self-portraits she stages and photographs herself, Ekpe treats her own image not as autobiography but as a point of departure for questions that extend beyond the personal: what is inherited, what is preserved, and what continues to shape us long after a moment has passed.

Her signature technique, Ekpe Papier Strata, layers dissolved paper into the painted surface to build skin-like ridges and folds, a material language for memory as something accumulated and continually reshaped. In works such as Where Flowers Remember, this inquiry extends to grief, maternal endurance and displacement within Nigeria, positioning tenderness as an act of resistance amid fractured environments. Ekpe's domestic interiors and reclining figures hold stillness, vulnerability and ritual in tension, revealing how identity is shaped as much by the spaces we inhabit as by the histories we carry within us.

Stella Ekpe (b. 1996) is a Lagos-based Nigerian multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice explores memory, identity, home, femininity and the psychological landscapes of lived experience. A graduate of the University of Port Harcourt with a degree in Painting, she works primarily with oil, pastel and material experimentation, building richly textured surfaces through her self-developed Ekpe Papier Strata technique, which layers transformed paper onto canvas to create skin-like folds and topographies.