Joy Adeboye wields watercolour as both medium and metaphor, allowing pigment and paper to enact a quiet yet radical reclamation. At this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair, AMG Projects shared the Nigerian artist’s solo presentation, The Perversions of Quiet Girls (2025) as part of Tomorrows/Today, a curated section that serves as a platform for emerging and underrepresented artists. With this body of work, Adeboye engages with the politics of visibility, desire and self-perception, rendering the body as both a site of intimacy and an archive of lived experience. Working in a muted palette of pinks and reds, her figures emerge and dissolve within the surface of the paper, evoking the tension between presence and erasure, interiority and external gaze.

In ‘Five Wise Virgins’, the composition gestures toward collective ritual and shared embodiment, with spectral figures interwoven in a choreography of touch and proximity. Their indistinct forms suggest a collapsing of individuality, a communal negotiation of sensuality and spirituality. This interplay between the corporeal and the ethereal recurs in ‘Magic’, where the body is fragmented, its representation filtered through memory, desire and trauma. The quadriptych structure disrupts linearity, offering instead a fractured, non-hierarchical engagement with the body, one that resists objectification and instead privileges subjective experience. Meanwhile ‘Superego’ extends this investigation into self-surveillance and the internalisation of social and moral expectations. The presence of the mirror introduces a psychological dimension, where the act of looking is both self-affirming and alienating. The figures seem caught in a cycle of self-apprehension, reflecting on the ways in which their bodies are read, disciplined and mediated through cultural and religious constructs.

These works reveal how Adeboye’s practice navigates the complexities of gendered representation, challenging the ways in which the female body has historically been framed through the lens of voyeurism and control. By embracing opacity, suggestion and dissolution, she proposes an alternative mode of visual engagement, one that privileges interiority over exposure, presence over spectacle.

When I catch up with this young, Lagos-based artist one Sunday morning, her soft-spoken demeanour belies a sharp and resolute engagement with her practice. We speak about water as a collaborator, the politics of the gaze and the complexities of self-reclamation in the contemporary world.

Mpumi Mayisa: The Perversions of Quiet Girls feels like a quiet unfolding, it's soft yet deliberate. How did you arrive at this visual language of both layering and omission?

Joy Adeboye: Honestly, I didn’t want what I’m exploring to be jarring, that only feeds the male gaze, which thrives on explicitness, while I find suggestion far more powerful. I thought about how Hollywood depicts sexual violence, always graphic, raw, like rage bait. I wanted to find another way, one that speaks through nuance and restraint rather than spectacle.

MM: Watercolour, with all its fluidity and unpredictability, is an interesting choice for exploring control and release. What does the medium allow you to say that others might not?

JA: Using watercolour is incredibly meditative. If you have control issues, you most likely won’t be able to use watercolour because it requires you to be patient and collaborative. I try to capture feelings, dreams and hazy concepts, which it does so beautifully. It makes it feel like you're looking into a memory. It's kind of hazy, but it's there, barely there.

MM: In ‘Doll People’ there are delicate movements where bodies flicker between presence and absence; the figures also seem to dissolve into one another, blurring the lines between self and other. What ideas were you unravelling here?

JA: I think that's all the work of the water. That's it. It feels more like a collaboration and less like a wielding. That's why I love to use watercolour, it lets each piece have its own character. So that movement is my intent in collaboration with the craftsmanship of the water. I like the sense of working with spirit. I mean, water is a spirit of its own. So, in the end, it feels like a surprise for me too.

MM: Flowers and petals recur throughout the work; what about their form, symbolism, or fragility made them essential here?

JA: I love flowers very much. I feel like God speaks in flowers. They're delicate, full of character and possibility in ways that mirror women. Most of my work has flowers and petals in them, I always find a way to include them as they just make things feel beautiful.

MM: Do you see your practice as a kind of unlearning; of shame, of restriction, of external narratives imposed on the self?

JA: I’m in a process of embracing my sensuality alongside my humanity, learning to accept the full spectrum of who I can be. After feeling like womanhood was defined for me, I’m confronting the pressure to always show up with a usefulness. I was frustrated by the reality of how women can be forced to live and traced it back through my deconstruction of organised religion. Why is sex and sexuality, especially for women, so cloaked in secrecy? Why is it taboo, hidden, made to feel dirty?

MM: ‘Five Wise Virgins’ leads me to think about mythologies around quiet girls and how silence is made synonymous with purity. I see disruption paired with a kind of reclamation.

JA: Yes, the entire series has polemic undertones. I'm disputing this fact that you're either a pure saint or a fallen woman, you know? I’m talking about how this doesn't make any sense because women should be allowed to be whatever they want to be, to express however. You can be quiet and still have desires.

MM: So, desire as fluid?

JA: Yes, I feel like desire is such a profound currency. It moves you to do things to grow. It just makes the world move.

MM: When I was in Nigeria I found that desire and sexuality are policed through religious and cultural frameworks. Does your work push against these narratives, or do you feel like they exist in negotiation with them?

JA: I'm not negotiating.

MM: What do you hope for when presenting work in an art fair environment?

JA: I’m excited to show new work. I'm curious to see how it’s received. I don't have any projections. I just want to see, you know, what comes to people's minds.