recent ongoings
Centrum is thrilled to present meditation on: woven fishing ports, a new installation by visual artist ebere agwuncha, created as part of Centrum’s In the Making residency program.
A weaver with a deep personal connection to fishing through their mother’s roots in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, agwuncha explores the shared maritime history between Port Harcourt and Port Townsend—both communities shaped by the fishing industry, craft labor, and inherited knowledge. Through fishing nets, stories, and tactile engagement, agwuncha’s work honors the visible and invisible labor that sustains fishing ports and the people within them.
Learn more on the project page
I participated in all studio open house with Norman Teague Design Studios during Expo Weekend. The ‘water tower’ sculptures are a series of works made as an ode to the historic Nigerian water collection system, called owoko. The ‘water tower’ aims to expose the primary convening points in a community where water is gathered, held, and re-distributed through various channels.
2026. woven reed, ceramic, cowrie shells. 10”W x 13”W x 18”H.
available for purchase
news
My work was featured in the Jupiter Benefit Auction 2025 hosted with Artsty.
“Jupiter is delighted to announce its debut benefit auction, titled As Ever, In Orbit, taking place exclusively on Artsy. Spanning painting, sculpture, and photography, the sale gathers 18 artists from across the globe whose work exemplifies the sensibilities we hold dear at Jupiter. They strive, as we name in our mission statement, to not only witness the world shift around them, but to be active architects of the world they wish to inhabit. Those included in this sale harmonize with our clarion call to create conditions that beget more viable writing lives for cultural critics by championing the exigent role writers play in the broader project of transforming the contemporary art world into a site of nurturance for artists across disciplines.”
about the work: soft bind (2025) by artist ebere agwuncha, is a sculptural memory that calls to the igbo technique of binding hair with nylon thread to lengthen it through a protective style; a hairstyle that the artist’s mother would do on her often as a child. The copper thread and woven reed bind to connect with hair (horsehair) at the base of the work.
view the work on Artsy here ->
“A feature of the artist ebere agwuncha who explores the regenerative, spiritual, and communal dimensions of material culture.” take a read of this wonderful essay written by a dear one, camille bacon via Sixty Inches From Center.
“... agwuncha’s artworks are cenobitic praise songs whose rhythm revolves around the Igbo principle of “eliminat[ing] the product and retain[ing] the process so that every occasion and every generation will receive its own impulse and experience of creation.”1 To this end, the sculpture (“the product”) is not satisfied with sitting inert and untouched. Like any alive thing, it calls out for touch, it yearns to be emptied and renewed. Like any reincarnation of history, it tugs on velvet rope to ring the bell of generational rememory. As such, the artist invited all who visited the exhibition to partake in a ritual (“the process”) in which they poured water from the owoko into glasses and offered it to the mound of loam upon which the sculpture was placed. Here, a means of coaxing whispers out from the earth’s core.”
read the full article here ->