My Fifth Element: A Language Between

My Fifth Element: A Language Between

Artist Statement by Somi Nwandu

Some things are inherited with clarity.
Others arrive fragmented, unnamed, incomplete
carried in the body, etched into memory,
passed quietly between generations like breath.

This series was born in that in-between: where tradition is remembered more than spoken, where symbols endure even as their stories fade, where beauty is not discovered but constructed from what remains.

In my earlier collection, ULI HOMAGE, I traced the beautifying language of Igbo women - Uli - not simply as visual tradition, but as vessel of memory, rhythm, and root. Those works gave me foundation. They offered me a place to stand, a structure of identity strong enough to hold me. But My Fifth Element: A Language Between moves beyond grounding. It is about becoming: about what unfolds when you exist between places, between inheritances, between languages that do not align… and still choose to speak.

Here, Uli is no longer only a mark of memory; it becomes a first alphabet. A structure I adapt, interrupt, extend. Not a tradition I preserve untouched, but a system I live inside - one I can stretch, reconfigure, and recast. Uli becomes my compass, a method of orientation, yet the map is mine to draw. This is not erasure of what came before. It is continuation. It is letting Uli evolve, letting it carry me into territories unnamed, but undeniably mine.

I do not come from one place. My inheritance is braided; multiple backgrounds layered together. These coordinates do not resolve neatly. They scatter, overlap, contradict. Yet in their scattering, a different coherence emerges; one that belongs to me.

In this work, Uli becomes more than beautification. It becomes a portal: a structure through which time, memory, and identity cross and transform. The lenticular lens amplifies this condition. It holds multiple truths at once, shifting with angle and light, refusing a single reading. It reveals identity not as surface, but as field - layered, unstable, alive.

What emerges is a language between: shaped from fragments and repetition, from things that do not align but insist on belonging. These works are acts of inheritance and invention. They draw from ancestral marks, gestures remembered, silences carried, and symbols created in the absence of what was lost. Some arrive with clarity; others come through the body before they reach the mind. Together, they compose a grammar of becoming.

This is not nostalgia. It is construction. A way of finding presence in absence, coherence in fracture. My work does not offer resolution. It offers rhythm. It offers form to complexity without flattening it. It says: I was here. I am here. I am still becoming.

My Fifth Element gestures beyond earth, air, fire, and water. Not toward spirit or essence in the abstract, but toward something personal and deliberate. Here, the fifth element is not inherited, but authored. It is built in the gaps where lineage falters, where tradition runs out of words, where memory no longer explains -  and yet the self insists on making sense. It is the part of identity that resists translation: the rhythm assembled from fragments, the structure composed from uncertainty. This is the fifth element: the language between memory and reinvention, between what was given and what must be made.