We’ve all stood at the precipice of a decision, feeling the pull of practicality against the raw force of passion. For artist Precious Opara, this tension played out in the journey from a fashion communication degree, pursued for its perceived stability, to an expansive interdisciplinary artistic practice. Her journey evokes the very sensations she explores in her art – the instinct of standing at the edge of a cliff and wanting to jump not out of harm, but to fly.

Precious’s work, rooted in her belief that everything possesses a personality, blurs the lines between the human form and fantastical natural sites. From the fluid, emotionally charged landscapes of her paintings, which she approaches with unwavering commitment, to her recent explorations in sculpture and glassblowing, Precious consistently seeks to bring the abstract into vivid, tangible existence.

You were interested in drawing from a young age, but ended up pursuing fashion under the—admittedly misguided—idea that it would be more stable. Was there a turning point that led you to pursue a more interdisciplinary career? Was it an active choice or something that just happened?

I have always loved art; it felt like the most powerful thing in my life. When I turned 18, I did an art foundation course where I went through different pathways before choosing my main one. When I got to fine art, I thought, There's no way in fuck I'm actually doing this. I'm quite idealistic but, at that age, reality starts approaching fast. I felt like I needed to show some sense of pragmatism.

I believed fashion communication allowed me to be creative while offering more job stability. In the first year of university, that felt true. I was learning about design houses, how they made ads, how certain designers translated their backgrounds. Then, in the second year, it became very business-minded, like they were prepping you to become an LVMH employee. I still had a naive concept of what working in fashion was, but interning really opened my eyes. I worked for a management and production agency, and it made me reflect on the kind of person I wanted to be, and what kinds of jobs I could compromise with.

I wouldn't say I regret it as it shook things up for me. I definitely don't think I would be so adamant about being an artist now if I hadn't experienced alternatives that weren't completely fulfilling.

I like that you framed it as reflecting on the kind of person you want to be. Have you figured that out?

I want to be content. Unfortunately, I'm not an easygoing person, even though I really wish I was. When things bother me, I struggle with trying to control it all.

Pursuing art has unexpectedly made me a better person in terms of my relationships with others. It introduced me to a new community of friends, helped my relationship with my family, and brought to the forefront how I think about things like music, faith, and the idea that everything has a personality.

Sometimes I think the way I see things is a little loosey-goosey, but painting brings out the abstract. It gives evidence to what I’m saying.

I relate to that. Do you have any specific rituals or habits that keep you grounded? What’s your creative process like?

It’s really weird. I don’t think I had any structure for the first couple of years. I’m not even sure exactly when I started, but let’s say 2021.

What happened in 2021? I'm curious as to why you chose that year.

I don't think I actually thought, Oh, I'm an artist until that time period. During university, I was just like, I'm a creative. I left the idea of being an artist behind and thought I would be this creative person who does everything artists do, but I wasn't sure I had the right to call myself one because I wasn’t going through artistic training.

I had a conversation during a critique at uni where someone basically said I wasn’t an artist because I hadn’t been to art school, and that I needed to decide whether I wanted to be a creator or a curator. I realised I wouldn’t be happy managing other people’s work because I kept running into this line of distinction and it bothered me.

I also didn’t start making work properly until 2021. During lockdown in 2020, I was painting as a way to pass the time. Eventually, I started to build a conceptual connection to what I was doing and began making work both for the magazine I was working at and just for the sake of creating.

I started to gain confidence when I got a mentor, Mollie Barnes, who didn’t really know me but looked at my work with a critical eye and said, You’ve got something here. There was also Sara Hemming, who was my boss for a while, and said in a meeting, Well, you’re an artist. I was like, Me? There were little angels around me who already knew what I was. I knew too, but it felt arrogant to say it out loud.

I get that, I feel like that's a very common experience.

I mark 2021 because that's when I started to just say it. That year, I consciously decided to create work with the understanding that this is something I'm building for the rest of my life.

Initially, I didn't have a deliberate process. I was using this archive of photographs, obsessing over my immediate surroundings, observing how I was changing, and questioning why everything around me seemed to have a personality. I started making collages by printing images from my home computer, scanning materials, and making collages out of them. With painting, I would come up with a concept and go straight to the paper or canvas without sketching.

I continued this approach until last year because there was so much I had on the bank that I needed to let off. Then around mid-last year, I realised there's a bigger body that I want to expand on, but there's such an excitement that my brain moves faster than my hands. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, so I realised I needed to pace things out. It's like trying to be my own teacher in a way, setting myself up to delve into the bigger body of work.

Now, my process involves organising files and images, and maintaining an absolute mess of a journal where I just write anything, and creating sketches to plan future works. Diving into each work feels very permanent so it began to build up a sense of anxiety for me, which isn’t helpful. I prefer excitement over anxiety, and that can sometimes be a very thin line.

Currently, I focus on writing, sketching, and evaluating before committing to big paintings, because I see paintings as a commitment. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people who is just like, Paint how you feel, and if not just throw it away. No, we're locked in. I get very emotionally invested in these paintings, so I can't just put them down. I take more appreciation for preparation before a painting now.

Speaking of being emotionally connected to each painting, you've expressed a desire for artwork to possess a soul-like essence. How does that play a part?

I think it’s because of my background. I was born and raised in a Christian household, where there's an element of believing beyond what's logical. It was a very safe, vulnerable, and earnest space.

One of the main reasons I paint the way I do—surreal, but also quite figurative—is because I’ve always been told, or have felt, that the way I think and speak can sound really abstract or wacky. My paintings have become an articulation exercise. I’m trying to bring those thoughts to life, to make them real for me and for you.

What always draws me into an image or painting is the sense that there’s a whole world or scenario beyond the frame. I love being able to imagine what happens next, or outside the setting of the painting. That’s what gets me, whether it’s in music, movies, or anything still. Each painting allows me to describe and push that feeling more.

There are so many natural elements in your work—land, water, and the way the human body seems to blur into the landscape. When it comes to recurring motifs, I’m always curious: why that? Why do you keep leaning into these elements?

Being raised in and around London, I feel like fantastical natural sites are a novelty, but we are very fortunate to have quite a lot of green spaces in the city. I find them to be very comforting in a way that feels both dangerous and sheltering. You can just be lost. They are also not easily replicable; if you look closely, nothing's ever quite the same.

There’s something deeply comforting in that sense of being lost, the way you can express so much in this space because no one else can fully find it. It ties back to my belief that everything has its own personality. I attach so much personality to my plants. When I go to the park, everything is a story.

Three years ago, when I went on my first residency in Tuscany, I ended up swimming a lot. I loved the feeling of suspension, of everything else falling away when you're underwater. Every time we left for the shops, we had to wind through the deepest valley I’ve ever seen. It ignites something in you, like the instinct you get standing at the edge of a cliff, wanting to jump. I remember one day driving up and feeling like I wanted to throw myself—not out of harm, I wanted to fly.

So it started from this simple concept that swimming is probably the closest I can get to flying, and imaging those together. When I came back, I started making portraits based on the sensations of being in water. I realised the landscape in itself is a subject, but it's also the space to encompass whatever I want to talk about.

The more I painted it, the more emotional responses it drew out of me. I saw how much it had the capacity to express every emotional response. And as I looked at water more closely, I saw it as a very expressive material. I had this urge to convey something emotional and real, and I realised that, as humans, emotions often have a physical effect on us. But emotions are also so intangible. Water sits right on the edge of that—between the physical and the emotional—and I thought, there’s so much to explore here.

I became quite obsessed with this understanding that by merging the human body and water, you can discuss something very internal—turning things inside out and realising we share these molecular structures. There’s a pressure not to lead with your emotions because they have consequences. They can hurt you, or others. Then I started thinking about how water can be as erratic and destructive as it wants, but we always have a desire to forgive it because it's so essential to life.

As a little silly human being, it’s almost wanting to covet. Water gets to be emotional, intense, full of feeling, and we still love it. In my paintings, I adopt that. I commit to being as emotional as I want. It’s full intensity, without the consequences.

I saw in an interview that you were developing an interest in sculpture. I wanted to follow up and ask, how has that evolved?

I made these little squidgy clay things because, while looking at my paintings, part of me wanted to actually hold a piece of them. I created these strange, fluid forms to see if I could get this merger point between something that felt like a human form in mutation.

This was an era where I started to make things more abstract. Until 2023, my paintings were very much these two separate forms—a human form and an animated fluidity—coming together. I wanted to move past that initial meeting point and push the transformation further. There was something in me that wanted to break through the surface, to make those interactions feel more vivid and real. I kept thinking about how to bring these imagined ideas into the physical world.

That’s what led me to a glassblowing class. I liked working with clay, but I knew I wanted the material to be translucent. I tried casting and moulding, but it felt too pre-planned and formulaic. I wanted the freedom to be more malleable, and I thought glassblowing might offer that so I signed up for a basic intro class. Using my breath to shape the glass and watching these odd forms appear was exciting. I couldn’t fully predict how anything would turn out. I was the only one in the class who messed up their piece, and I was kind of proud of that. Everyone else made perfect vases while mine came out misshapen, but I was aiming for an organic shape. The unintended is what I want to pursue. The only limitation is that it's quite expensive. It's something that I do want to pursue, but hopefully with better funding.

Ah, funding! The downfall of everything. Since you work across different mediums, I was wondering how they inform and influence each other. If there are any connections between them that might surprise someone. I ask because I am a writer but also an events coordinator, and sometimes people are surprised by that, as the former is considered to be an introverted activity while the latter is very extroverted. Still, I find all sorts of links between them.

Because I started with collages, I didn’t realise painting would hijack my attention. As I was collecting so much imagery, I realised I wanted more freedom to manipulate forms and bend them toward what I was thinking. Still, collage taught me there are so many layers to things. It made me more confident in creating worlds and understanding composition.

When I make reference images for the photography I’m making now, I can see the influence from my collage era. My sister is my research partner, whether she likes it or not, so when I say to her, Hey, I have this vision for what I want to do, I’m able to direct it a lot more easily.

Having a background in art direction taught me how to make decks and clearly communicate a vision so someone else can understand it. It also taught me how to organise, file, and access my own image bank. The experience of working in a setting that wasn’t exactly corporate but had more of a business vibe helped me think of myself as my own client. That’s why I don’t regret going to fashion school. Being a photographer and image-maker gave me tools I still use now. I know how to work with others, build a team, and run my own photoshoot to get the references I need for my paintings.

That's really interesting, because the last person I interviewed for Mola was my friend Laisul, who also has a fashion background to some extent. What is it about that industry?

Fashion business corrupts everything people love about fashion. I think what’s true of fashion is also true of art because both rely on a small group of wealthy people. Unfortunately, as more money comes in, the politics lean towards the right. It starts from the bottom, with these amazing, genuine, wide-eyed, and passionate people. Then it gets poisoned by well-to-do, mostly conservative and often bigoted individuals, and that crushes a lot of it. It’s sad, having to navigate that, figuring out which decisions you can live with.

With all that in mind, do you have any advice for your 18-year-old self in that confusing situation?

Don't cry, you didn't mess up your entire life by going to art foundation late. You're fine. Don't accept free internships. Also, invest in Zoom. Savings are fun, don’t dip into savings. Boys are mean. You're fine.

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