Chief Nike Okundaye offers batik and tie-dye workshops as part of Afrikadey!

Not many artists can count the White House and Buckingham Palace among their clients. But Nigerian textile artist Chief Nike Okundaye is one of the few who can. Just don’t expect the 58-year-old — who comes from a noble family and is the acting regent of a Nigerian village — to dwell on it. Rather, Okundaye focuses on the spirit of her work.

“I love doing something that makes me happy. When I do batik, it’s like healing for me,” she says. “If anything is upsetting you, you forget. The moment I’m working, I’m in another world until I finish.”

Okundaye has made an international name for herself as a textile artist, practising batik and tie-dye using traditional techniques of the Yoruba culture. (Batik is a way of decorating fabric with intricate designs using wax as a resist.) Traditional Nigerian methods also involve hand painting fabric with a chicken feather and hand stitching. Okundaye even continues to make her own indigo dyes without chemicals.

“Everything you take from the earth and put back in the earth,” she explains.

Okundaye learned the art of batik from her great grandmother, after her mother died when she was only six years old. She recalls using discarded candle stubs from the Catholic church she attended, because she could not afford to buy wax. It was also in the church that some of her earliest works were displayed and people started to notice her skill.

Eventually, batik became her way out of poverty and an abusive marriage.

“I call it ‘fabric of hope.’ It has brought me so much joy to be independent from the abuse when I was married. When I do the work, I can concentrate on the work, instead of thinking, ‘I’m going to fight tomorrow,’” she says.

Okundaye started travelling in 1974 to teach workshops and to sell her wares, before she knew any English. She would wear dresses made from fabric she decorated, something she says remains one of her marketing strategies.

“Little by little, I was able to save. I was able to put together a three-bedroom house. It cost under $500. It took me a good 10 years to be able to do that. It’s not that easy,” she explains, noting the income for women in many villages remains lower than 50 cents a day.

Today, she teaches other women the same skills that allowed her to gain her independence.

“The batik is what I use to free the other women,” she says. “The people I’m teaching here, they have hope that if this woman, who does not go to secondary school, who does not go to university, if she can stay in this country and make it in life, why not us?”

Okundaye has five art centres in Nigeria where textile artists, drummers, painters and sculptors come to learn, apprentice and grow.

“A lot of the women who have no hope, they come to my centre and go back with joy because, in another one or two years, they have their own little shop and are able to have their own independence,” she says.

Okundaye, who has since remarried, travels with some of these women on sales trips, sharing both profits and expenses. She also paints, sculpts and passes along her skills to her six children (the youngest of whom is 12) and eight grandchildren.

She divides her time between Lagos and Osogbo, known for its vibrant arts scene and also home to a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, as well as her native village of Ogidi, where she’s teaching women how to vote.

“I always tell people, when opportunity is given to you, you just make use of it and do it properly,” she says.

Okundaye is coming to Calgary to offer a workshop the first week in August on tie-dye and batik as part of this year’s Afrikadey! Festival. She will also be speaking at a symposium on Friday, August 7 at the downtown Calgary Public Library on healing through the arts, a topic with which she’s had first-hand experience.

As for what she wants to pass along to Calgarians who take her workshop?

“What I hope they will take away is a good memory and my big good spirit,” she says.