Yoruba Works

Yoruba Works documents labour and everyday life across southwest Nigeria, bringing together Blue Hands in Abeokuta’s adire dye yards and Bodija in Ibadan to explore craft, trade, knowledge, community and place.

Yoruba Works is a documentary photography project made across southwest Nigeria in 2025. It brings together two connected series, Blue Hands, photographed in the adire dye yards of Abeokuta, and Bodija, photographed inside one of Ibadan’s oldest open markets.

Blue Hands follows the making of adire cloth through the people who keep the practice alive. Fabric is folded, tied, dyed, lifted, opened and laid out across the yard to dry. What begins concealed gradually reveals its colour and pattern. Behind that transformation is knowledge accumulated through generations, visible in the hands, movements and working spaces of the dyers.

The project then moves to Bodija Market, where the focus shifts from making to exchange. Traders, customers, food and goods move through a dense everyday environment shaped by relationships, experience and labour. Yams, grains, vegetables and other produce sit alongside the people whose knowledge of their goods, customers and place within the market gives Bodija its identity.

Together, the two series consider how places reveal themselves through the people who work within them. For UNFOLD, the project is about more than the physical opening of cloth. It is about allowing stories of craft, labour, knowledge and everyday life to unfold gradually through observation. From the dye yards of Abeokuta to the market stalls of Ibadan, the photographs ask the viewer to look beyond the surface and pay attention to the people and processes that make a place what it is.