Betty Ogún (b.2001) is an English artist practicing in London. Her work is produced in a variety of media such as painting, textile, installation and photography as well as video art. Although her primary focus is on colour, she has produced works with physical qualities of texture and works with underlying messages. Her pieces are an active reflection of her life’s experiences and a response to current times.

On the whole, the practice draws on navigating Betty’s urban existence as a Black British woman, considering cultural identities and popular subcultures within music, fashion and design, and documenting all of these things. Using textiles in the forms of weaving and tufting, Betty creates ‘tuftestries’; rugs woven with thick yarn, hung on walls and draped over readymade objects. These pieces are a good indicator of how the rest of her bodies of work function, where they are reused and repeated or reinvented with new meanings. Betty ‘recycles’ her works, sitting and ruminating on one or a few pieces for up to ten months at a time, reinforcing their presence by destroying them, subverting their presence, and/or curating them in a completely different way to previous presentations. The audience’s reception is monitored by Betty during exhibiting. 

After graduating from Central Saint Martins FAD in 2021, her main pursuit is to connect viewers with sentiment and solace. Since coming to the Slade UCL in 2021, Betty’s work has been realised as being inspired by cultural movements, rap music, and modes of self-expression. Having once begun as commentaries on these cultural movements as well as messages about British systems of governance and technological developments, Betty’s voice has become more confident in believing in her compositions about her own experiences to be powerful, without constantly extracting heavier hidden messages.