StoreTaofique Folarin (TAF) is an Afro-queer, Jamaican–Nigerian multidisciplinary and conceptual artist whose practice centres on reconnecting with the self through healing, spiritual exploration, culture, and transformation. Primarily working with photography, intentional digital editing, charcoal and ink mark-making, sound, and performance, he adopts an experimental, materially responsive approach — often using readily available materials within domestic settings, including ink, spray paint, wax, and incidental objects. This openness to experimentation is shaping an expanding sculptural aspect of his practice.
Taofique’s work is process-oriented and non-linear. Creation develops naturally rather than aiming for fixed results, guided by subconscious intuition and a divinely inspired sensibility. Mental health is a central focus that shapes both its content and approach. Images often originate as personal or self-produced material and are reworked to explore the hidden, the unspoken, and what lies beyond what the eye initially perceives.
Editing functions as a fundamental conceptual framework rather than a finishing tool. Taofique approaches editing as a way of thinking and feeling. His natural editing language works with intensity, contrast, vibrancy, and frequency as visual representatives of emotional, psychological, and spiritual states. Each intervention operates in parallel with inner conditions, allowing complex experiences to be translated rather than simplified. Extreme internal states require thoughtful visual responses. Through this process, darker moments and vulnerable truths are handled with nuance and care, revealing what was previously hidden or inaccessible. Working from an Afro-queer, diasporic perspective, his practice is trauma-informed and rooted in lived experience and his ancestry. Vulnerability is seen not as exposure but as a space of attention, sensitivity, and transformation. Pacing, restraint, and ambiguity are intentionally used, enabling the work to hold difficult emotional and psychological states without spectacle. Viewers are invited to reflect inwardly, question their assumptions, and engage beyond surface-level interpretation.
Shaped by his own intersectionality, Taofique’s work embodies spiritual, diasporic, and Afro-queer perspectives. Moving fluidly across disciplines, his practice allows photography, sound, performance, and digital composition to inform one another without hierarchy. This cross-genre approach contributes a hybrid visual language to contemporary art, expanding how intersectionality, inner life, and spiritual experience are represented and understood. Current material experimentation continues to inform an evolving sculptural and spatial direction within the practice.
Operating under the ethos 〒▲℉ — Truth. Authenticity. Freedom, his practice exists in flux and contributes to his living body of work — evolving, responsive, and deeply intentional. Each creation is an act of inquiry.
My work is rooted in the process of integration, the ongoing dialogue between the conscious and unconscious parts of the self. I am interested in how psychological wholeness arises not through repression or certainty, but through recognition, encounter, and incorporation. Much of my practice focuses on what lies beneath conscious awareness: the shadow, the unspoken, and the archetypal material that influences behaviour, belief, and identity.
I explore the self through art as a personal cosmology, a way of mapping inner experience in relation to the wider world. Spirituality is not separate from psychology; it is a central dimension of the human psyche. My own spiritual experiences prompted me to begin the process of integration, leading me towards a deeper sense of meaning and coherence. Through making, I engage in a process of individuation not as an endpoint, but as a lived, unfolding practice of becoming more whole.
Art, psychology, and spirituality are not separate disciplines in my practice but interconnected pathways to understanding and integration. Creativity is a natural expression of the psyche, not a specialised skill reserved for artists. I see creative practice as a space where inner material can emerge safely, enabling unconscious content to be recognised, engaged with, and transformed.
I actively connect with my unconscious through spontaneous and intuitive processes, letting images, sensations, and impulses surface without rushing to interpret them. These then take form through photography, editing, drawing, painting, writing, or movement. This approach allows conscious intention and unconscious material to interact, creating work shaped by both control and surrender. Through this exchange, psychological tension isn't eliminated but rechanneled, opening pathways to resolution, insight, and integration.
Rather than illustrating internal states, my work facilitates a process of encounter. It invites both myself and the viewer into a space where imagination can flow freely, where meaning emerges through attention rather than explanation, and where transformation becomes possible through sustained engagement with what has been concealed.