Omalola Mau (b. 1998) is a Canadian artist living and working in the UK. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art in 2021 after completing a foundation degree at City and Guilds of London Art School. She has a multidisciplinary practice with an emphasis on painting and video. In her work she explores themes of gathering, heritage, and preserving moments.

Through her practice Mau explores the gap between feeling and being something and in particular she is fascinated with the concept of closeness and connection in a time where everything has become so atomized due to the pandemic forcing separation, and in relation to that, the fracturing that takes place through immigration over time. She choses to work in both video and painting because of the way that they are quite opposite mediums and that gives the ability to stretch her practice to both the extremes by engaging with the materiality of both.

In her video work Mau explores extending small moments in time and the role of the lens. She also explores the distance and separation between their subject and themselves, which became a theme in their work. To make these pieces Mau combines their own footage with archival footage from various sources. Intentional sensitivity, slowness, and meaningful moments are at the crux of her video work and it is these elements that connect the works and define them.

Through painting Mau is exploring her own history and experiences, by painting still life of food and household objects to explore the idea of gathering and togetherness. Thematically her paintings have now merged with her video work but the paintings examine cultural identity more explicitly. She was drawn to painting as a way to record her own experiences, this comes from a long term interest in archives, particularly non-traditional archives, which she explored in her dissertation this year.