Petroleum wax does not arrive in an art gallery without a past. It comes from oil, from bodies transformed under geological pressure, from extraction and from an industry that has enriched some places while damaging others. Linda Lamignan chooses it because those histories are not separate from their own. Their mother comes from Nigeria’s Delta State; their father from Stavanger, Norway’s oil capital. In Lamignan’s hands, the material can melt, hold pigment, harden into a shape or make a vessel for another object. It refuses to remain a mute sign of either wealth or harm.
Lamignan explained this relationship in a conversation with Nina Cramer at Art Hub Copenhagen. They work with petroleum and paraffin wax from an animist perspective, attending to a material’s memory and its capacity to change. Heat and gravity can produce a form the artist does not wholly control. The resulting object is neither a diagram of the oil economy nor a fantasy of escaping it. It gives a contested substance another use, while allowing its earlier life to remain present.
The practice crosses performance, video, sculpture, sound and painting. It also crosses the sea between West Africa and Scandinavia without pretending the two coasts have equal positions in the history of extraction. A 2024 exhibition at Galleri F 15 gathered work made since 2021 around rivers, language, inherited stories and the question of how a living landscape is valued. The gallery’s title, If You Go to the River, sounds like the beginning of advice. It asks a visitor to approach water as a bearer of knowledge rather than a route for moving commodities.
Lamignan has described another means of travel: Linda Lazer, an alter ego imagined from outer space. In their Art Hub Copenhagen interview, they said that Lazer gave them room to make art and inhabit a body after racism in an art institution had narrowed that room. The figure moves among gender, technology, nature and culture. Lamignan linked Lazer’s nonlinear sense of time to the work of Black Quantum Futurism. That connection does not turn every wax sculpture into science fiction. It does show how a speculative self can open a way to work with histories that ordinary categories hold apart.
Oil is a material with memory
Stavanger and Delta State appear in Lamignan’s work as lived places joined by a global industry. Norwegian oil has supported national wealth. In the Niger Delta, extraction has another history of exploitation and environmental injury. Lamignan knows both through family and through the matter they shape. Petroleum wax becomes a way to think at the scale of a hand while keeping those larger relations in view. A small cast object can carry a story of pressure, transport and uneven power without illustrating all of it literally.
In Cramer’s interview, Lamignan described wall sculptures formed when melted wax followed heat and gravity. The artist set conditions, then allowed the material to move. That is a meaningful division of labour. Sculpture is often imagined as an imposition of the maker’s will on inert substance. Here, the material responds and the maker attends. The shape records an encounter with temperature and time. It can resemble a map, but one drawn partly by forces beyond the artist’s plan.
The wax is still a by-product of crude oil. Lamignan’s animism does not purify it or undo the economy from which it came. It asks for another relation to it. If materials carry histories and perhaps intentions, their transformation is not merely a technical effect. A gallery wall can become a place to consider what is taken from the earth and what kinds of value are assigned to what remains. The artist’s touch changes the wax’s immediate form while leaving the violence and dependency of extraction available to thought.
This attention to matter also complicates the word futurism. A future made from oil is already difficult to imagine without reckoning with what oil has done. Lamignan’s art does not offer a clean technological solution. It finds the future in relations among bodies, minerals, memories and landscapes. Time runs through the substance: once-living organisms become petroleum, petroleum becomes wax, wax becomes an artwork. None of those transformations erases the previous one.
In the 2021 Stavanger exhibition those who do not travel never arrive: Carry Your Home, Lamignan placed a video work beside sculpture and textiles. Rogaland Kunstsenter’s exhibition account describes an inquiry into migration, transformation and the experience of living between places. In an interview with Contemporary Art Stavanger, Lamignan explains that people in the video share thoughts about travel, the future and lives touched by oil. The work gives individual voices room inside a gallery inquiry into movement and home. Diaspora is not reduced to an abstract image of crossing water. People describe memory and possibility in their own terms.
The exhibition’s calabash forms offered another kind of carrier. In a long interview at Contemporary Art Stavanger, the artist and interviewer discuss cast forms of the gourd-like object appearing on the floor, on plinths and as amulets. Repetition does not make them identical. A calabash can be understood through use, cultivation and carrying; in wax, its relation to an oil economy becomes newly visible. One form moves between different placements, asking what an object holds as it changes context.
A home, in this exhibition, is not a fixed address. Its title proposes carrying home, perhaps on the body and perhaps in what people tell one another. That proposition gains force from the actual voices in the video. It avoids a romantic image of effortless mobility. Movement can be chosen, forced, remembered or inherited, and the histories carried along differ. The sculptural vessels do not settle those differences. They give them material room.
An alter ego with a different clock
Linda Lazer began as a way to enter a space Lamignan felt was missing. In their Art Hub Copenhagen account, the alter ego came from an experience of racism during art school and gave shape to a place beyond the immediate social world. Lazer is not a disguise that lets the artist avoid reality. It is a figure through which a part of that reality can be met otherwise. A being from outer space can stand outside inherited categories long enough to test whether they are necessary.
Lamignan’s 2021 interview in Contemporary Art Stavanger describes Lazer as a means for a suppressed queer self to become visible. The artist later came to understand the alter ego and their own identity as less separable than before. That development prevents a simple tale in which a persona performs freedom while the “real” artist remains unchanged. The persona altered the possibilities of the practice and of self-understanding. Art’s fiction had effects in ordinary life.
Time is part of that change. Lamignan told Cramer they were interested in a circular understanding in which past, present and future affect one another. They named Black Quantum Futurism in that discussion as a practice that had opened directions to explore through Lazer. The idea is useful beside the wax, too. Geological past, family memory, industrial present and possible future are physically brought together in one material. A sculpture can hold several times at once without turning them into a neat sequence of progress.
The otherworldly figure also changes the sense of place. If Lazer belongs to many places and between categories, then being between Stavanger, Copenhagen and a Nigerian family history need not be presented as a deficiency. Lamignan’s works can acknowledge displacement while refusing the demand to choose one authentic origin. This refusal does not erase the differences among places. It gives the artist a way to make connections without flattening them.
The figure of an alien has a long history in Black speculative art, where estrangement can be both a social condition and a source of imaginative power. Lamignan’s version is intimate and specific. It grows from art-school experience, gendered self-discovery and a search for a room in which work could happen. Its power lies not in an elaborate fictional biography but in the new relations it permits among the artist’s media and histories.
The river speaks in several voices
For If You Go to the River, Lamignan travelled in 2023 to Nigeria’s Delta State, taking a boat along the Forcados River to Gbaramatu, their grandfather’s community. Galleri F 15’s exhibition text describes local accounts of crocodiles as sacred guardians called “mother.” The encounter enters work about living landscapes and the violence of seeing them only as resources. A crocodile is not a decorative symbol added to an oil painting. It belongs to a network of stories and relations within a particular place.
The gallery brought together video, painting, sound and performance. Its work list includes the 2024 video DIRIMOR and the 2023 video Toru Torubiri Biri (Eye Sea Water), the latter involving 3D work by Kristoffer Amundsen and video material by Linda Lamignan, Geoffrey Ogoba and Seidougha Ogoba. Two Tongues (Abede) is an eight-minute sound loop composed by Nova Varnrable with voices by Esther Oruwa Ogoba, Margret Malaku Roland Tonlagha and Geoffrey Ogoba. Naming these collaborators matters to the shape of the exhibition. Its river does not speak with one borrowed voice. Stories and technologies pass among relatives and artistic partners.
The work list also names Ripples Follow Our Path, a 2024 installation of pigmented petroleum wax, metal wire and approximately 8,000 metres of aluminium chain spread across a large area. The chains give the idea of a ripple another weight. A ripple is usually imagined as brief and light, but metal can hang, pull and mark distance. Wax introduces colour and another material history. The title makes a path perceptible without claiming that every route taken by a person or a substance can be traced to one beginning.
Lamignan’s Petroleum Landscapes works place pigmented wax on wooden panels. The title is direct but not simple. A landscape painted or formed from a substance extracted from landscapes holds the process of extraction within its own surface. The viewer can see colour and composition while knowing that the medium brings industry into the image. The work’s beauty does not erase the material’s route; it makes an encounter with that route harder to avoid.
The gallery text presents rivers and islands as extensions of bodies and carriers of memory. Such language has consequences for how an audience looks. A river is not merely scenery behind a human story. It is a participant in what people remember, protect, exploit and pass on. The exhibition invites a different scale of attention, one in which a family’s oral history and a waterway’s geological and industrial histories can appear together.
A digital sea, a material shore
In a Stavanger Museum collaboration with Kristoffer Amundsen, Lamignan explored another route between physical and digital forms. Amulets hanging from a ceiling had been transformed from objects into digital models and then 3D printed back into physical forms. A video created a digital underwater landscape. The museum connected this scene to Stavanger’s maritime history, its oil industry and present debate over seabed minerals needed for technology.
The sequence of object, model and object is not a simple upgrade. An amulet may lose a former function as it becomes data, then gain another presence when printed. The passage makes a viewer ask what a digital representation carries and what it leaves behind. For an artist already concerned with memory in materials, this is a sharp question. A file can preserve shape while changing substance. A printed form can return to a room without returning to the same history of touch.
The underwater image asks what a coastal city expects from the sea. Fishing, folklore, tourism, oil and prospective mining each define a different relationship to it. The digital reconstruction cannot be treated as a harmless escape from extraction when the devices that make it may depend on minerals taken from another seabed. Lamignan and Amundsen’s work lets that tension remain active. Technology is part of the scene, but its material cost is visible in the question the work poses.
This is where Lamignan’s speculative practice becomes especially precise. Linda Lazer imagines a being who moves beyond fixed categories; the museum work puts contemporary digital processes into contact with amulets and a threatened marine world. Neither project treats the future as a screen floating above the earth. Both insist that images, bodies and tools are made from materials and histories that continue to matter.
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams brings a group with roots in the Democratic Republic of Congo into a speculative fashion shoot and a conversation about their country’s possible futures. Lamignan works with different materials and a different geography, but the two projects share an attention to who gets to imagine a future for a place shaped by extraction.
The river of Lamignan’s exhibition is not an escape route from the world. It runs through particular land, family stories and an industry that binds Nigeria and Norway unequally. Petroleum wax holds a geological past and can be reshaped by heat. An alter ego opens an imaginative room in which a body can move beyond a category that had confined it. Digital models become objects again, changed by the journey. Across these works, transformation never means forgetting what a thing was. The future remains answerable to its materials, to the people who carried them and to the living landscapes from which they came.