6.Wenger’s Interpretation and Reconstruction of the Oshun Forest

A. The Oshun Forest before Wenger: The Traditional Conception

Wenger’s work embodies the idea of forest as cosmos that one encounters in traditional cosmolgies, specifically, in Africa, among the Yoruba of Southern Nigeria, where the Oshun Forest is situated in the town of Oshogbo. Within the structure of this style of thought, the concept of the forest embraces both the conventional understanding of a forest as a sequence of plants covering a wide expanse of land, demonstrating a significant level of ecological complexity as well as the concept of cosmos, which consists in the perception of the universe as an interrelated correlation of disparate elements. Within this conception, the ecological complexity and harmony of the forest embodies a corresponding complexity and harmony of being which integrates and yet goes beyond the physical manifestation of this systemic interrelationship.

Within this structure of ecological and ontological complexity is demonstrated a coinherence of matter and spirit operating at various levels of sophistication and complexity. Along with the biological characteristics of the plants and animals that populate the forest, their spiritual characteristics are also perceived as demonstrating an overt or covert presence, depending on a host of variables

The forest, therefore, in its integration of a vast web of beings, at various levels of existence, physical and spiritual, is perceived as a cosmos in its own right6.

It is this concept of the forest, as encountered in traditional Yoruba thought, that operates as the inspirational matrix for Wenger’s work. The sculptures she creates, either individually, or in collaboration with other artists, and situates at various points in the Oshun forest, represent artistic crystallizations of her own apprehension of the sacred presences that she intuits as animating various aspects of the forest.

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6 Irele and Soyinka describe evocatively the symbolic conception of the forest in relation to “the existential condition of man in Yoruba thinking” in which “the forest stands for the universe, inhabited by obscure forces to which man stands in a dynamic moral and spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved” in Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London; Heinemann, 1981).Elaborating upon the traditional Yoruba conception of nature evident in Irele’s depiction of the symbolism of the forest, Soyinka describes the poetry of Yoruba hunters as celebrating “…animal and plant life [seeking] to capture the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe”in Wole, Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).