This Nigerian artist creates mosaic portraits from old soles

Picking through a field of garbage, Nigerian artist Eugene Conboy hunts down a special kind of trash: plastic flipflops that he transforms into multi-colored mosaic paintings of his community. Both an artist and environmentalist, Conboy says recycling flipflops targets one of the worst plastic polluting items in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, which has more than 210 million people and is growing rapidly. .

Only a tiny fraction of waste is recycled in the West African state, where 200,000 tonnes of plastic end up in the Atlantic every year, according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation.

Using a shovel, Conboy moved a large pile of flip-flops to a corner of his studio.

Then he cleans them and cuts them into squares—some squares the size of a typical ceramic wall tile, others the size of a large postage stamp.

The tiles are then affixed to a board, which become pixels in a larger picture.

“Flip-flops are one of the major actors in plastic pollution,” Conboy said. “Almost everyone has at least one pair in every household.”

The artist paints a portrait of a local community in the city of Abeokuta, southwestern Osun State. Sometimes he is paid for his work and also gets commission from some clients.

The images on the walls of his studio slowly emerge from a pattern of multicolored flip-flop pieces that he arranges on the background.

“The first is to get my materials and lay them out in the sun and rain before I bring them into my studio,” he said.

“I sort them by their color, by their tone, then I cut them.”

Garbage dumps and landfills are a common sight on roadsides or in vacant lots in Nigeria, and recycling is rare.

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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)