Precious Okoyomon’s artistic universe unfolds at the intersection of spiritual lyricism, ecological mythmaking and embodied vulnerability, where poetry and sculpture entwine in a language of excess, decay and transformation, and this transdisciplinary practice extends from the page to the gallery through a pantheistic vision that draws on Afro-diasporic poetics, queer ecologies and the theological sublime to reimagine both history and the human as porous, entangled and ever-becoming; their latest publication But Did You Die? encapsulates this ethos by channeling the material sensibility of their immersive installations—such as the monumental, patchwork-like stuffed creatures or living ecosystems of kudzu and sugar—into textual form, where each poem becomes a terrain of its own, pulsing with desire, rot, grief and transcendence, refusing the linear logic of redemption or closure, and instead offering a field of radical becoming through failure, excess and joy, while installations like To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2021) at the Luma Foundation, where soil, moss, feral plants and soft toys collapse into each other, operate as both altars and ruins, where the animate and inanimate are kin and where Okoyomon’s commitment to divine monstrosity becomes tactile, allowing death, Blackness, queerness and tenderness to cohabit without hierarchy; this poetics of embodiment reconfigures affect as a site of resistance, insisting that the sacred is inseparable from the broken, that softness is not a lack but a strategy, and that the work of mourning can also be the work of world-making.
