The Artist

I’m Joy-Jayne Bassey, a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist, poetic essayist, and cultural facilitator working in material abstraction, poetic form, and visual theology.

My artist practice is rooted in scar, story, and sacredness. I create using found materials, layered textures, and ruptured surfaces—making what our wounds can’t say. Through a framework I call the theology of rust, I treat erosion not as damage but as a site of survival. I don’t polish over the break. I stay with it.

My visual language draws from Brutalism and material abstraction. I work with paper, fabric, charcoal, and acrylic—building compositions that carry both weight and witness.

Each piece is a process of observation and reverence. I’m interested in the scars experience leaves behind, the stories they carry, and the sacredness that survives.

My current body of work, The Rust Series, is a collection of sculptural forms that explore impermanence, transformation, and the beauty of what remains after impact.

The work moves between the poetic and the structural—sometimes sculptural, sometimes flat—but always built from what endures.

Not Polish Not Perfect. But Human

Theology of Rust