BIOGRAPHY
My name is Senibo Nelson Jaja. I was born on the 22nd of October 1992 in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria, a city whose industrial pulse and humid air would shape my artistic consciousness long before I had the words or brushes to express it.
My creative journey began not in a studio, but under a coffee table. At age five, I drew a Looney Tunes character on its underside, a quiet rebellion that startled my parents and lit a spark in me. From that moment, I believed I could draw, and I began exploring the world through images. Inspired by Nigerian comic series like Super Strikas, I made my first stabs at storytelling through sketch and illustration. I ruined countless walls in my childhood home in the process.
By the time I reached secondary school, Art class had become sanctuary. I understood visual language intuitively. I vividly remember the first time we were taught pencil shading, how I stunned my teacher by rendering plants with light, depth, and intensity beyond my years. Throughout school, I never earned less than an A in Art, and with each passing term, I grew more confident that this practice, this obsession, was my calling.
I moved to England for higher education and attended Hurtwood House, a school where art was more than curriculum, it was lifeblood. There, I immersed myself in painting, sculpture, collage, and conceptual thinking. I experienced the emotional high of painting a portrait that truly captured a soul, and from then on, I chose studio time over football matches, even as the school’s starting center forward. I had found something that made time stand still.
Despite this deep pull toward fine art, I studied Architecture at university, a compromise that satisfied both my parents’ expectations and my own desire for visual storytelling. I returned to Nigeria in 2017 and joined the National Youth Service Corps in 2018, serving in Lagos. I worked at Oshinowo Studio (formerly Studio CmDA) under renowned architect Tosin Oshinowo. This was a pivotal period. I was designing spaces by day, and by night, quietly sketching, painting, experimenting. My artistic identity was expanding across architecture, painting, furniture, fashion, and spatial storytelling.
In 2019, I left the studio and founded my first creative venture, JJKxng Design. I focused primarily on event architecture, collaborating closely with Event Architects Ltd. (formerly No Surprises Events). We curated some of Lagos’ most high-profile experiences in 2019 and 2020. I also partnered with the Lagos streetwear brand Forty Seven, where I helped shape their visual identity and designed several clothing pieces still worn today.
But something deeper was stirring.
When the world paused in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I returned home to Port Harcourt and returned fully to art. That stillness allowed me to dig into myself. I began refining my painting techniques, moving from impressionist portraiture to more expressive, unfiltered styles. Influenced by street culture and cartoon iconography, I created the Tongue Wagging Slobs, bright, grotesque, irreverent characters with a voice of their own.
The Slobs became a breakthrough. I shared them online, and by 2021, they began gaining traction. People bid on them. They resonated. Though far from the traditional African aesthetic, no dancers, no huts, no stereotyped symbolism, they were deeply African to me. They reflected my Nigeria, with all its humour, chaos, trauma, and beauty. They told stories of everyday life in Lagos and Port Harcourt, and people connected with that raw honesty.
Throughout these years, I signed my work with names like JJKxng and Senicasso, clues to the evolving shapes my identity was taking. And today, I continue that evolution.
I am the founder of Senitography Designs Limited, a growing architectural practice in Port Harcourt. My design work lives at the intersection of functionality and expression, while my fine art practice has expanded into exhibitions, sculpture, collage, and textiles. I exhibited in 2023, married in 2024, and have continued to evolve my visual language with each year.
My art is not about escaping reality, it’s about reassembling it. Whether I’m working in paint, fabric, concrete, or space, I am always trying to translate something true, something felt but often unseen.
This is the thread that ties everything I do: an obsessive desire to communicate, to translate emotion into form, to capture spirit in matter. I am not merely documenting the world, I am reimagining it, one mark at a time.
CV
I am a Nigerian artist and architect, born and raised in Port Harcourt. My formal education began at Montessori International Primary School, where I graduated in 2003, and continued at the British International School in Victoria Island, Lagos, where I completed my secondary education in 2008. I later moved to the United Kingdom to attend Hurtwood House in Surrey, a school known for its strong focus on the arts. There, I studied Fine Art, English, Physics, and Business Studies at A-Level, and was honoured with the Michelangelo Award for excellence in painting.
My higher education continued at De Montfort University in Leicester, where I first completed a Foundation Diploma in Fine Art in 2012. I then pursued a Bachelor of Architecture, graduating in 2015 with Upper Second-Class Honours, and went on to earn a Master of Architecture degree in 2017 with Merit Honours. Throughout my academic years, I consistently received recognition for artistic achievement, including several Art Attainment Awards during secondary school.
My journey into professional art exhibition began with a group show in Lagos under Zarnelia Art Gallery, which marked my public debut. In 2023, I held my first solo exhibition, A Ballad of Slobs, in London, where I showcased my expressive, character-driven works influenced by street culture, cartoons, and contemporary Nigerian life. Later that year, I followed up with a second solo exhibition, Dreamcatcher, in Lagos, expanding on the themes of identity, memory, and personal myth.
Today, I run an architectural practice, Senitography Designs Limited, while continuing to develop my artistic practice through painting, sculpture, collage, and textile work. My dual background in art and architecture allows me to move fluidly between disciplines, blending structural precision with emotional expression. My work is rooted in storytelling, often drawing from lived experience to create visual languages that are both personal and reflective of my environment.
STATEMENT
I have always seen the world sideways, through reflection, distortion, humour, and memory. My first act of art was drawn under a coffee table in 1997, not on paper, but on the unseen surface of domestic life. That hidden cartoon sketch was more than a child’s doodle. It was a quiet declaration: I exist, and I will speak in images.
My practice is a dialogue between chaos and structure. As both an architect and an artist, I live between lines; some rigid, some impulsive. In architecture, I build for shelter. In art, I build for feeling. Where one demands order, the other demands surrender. I honour both.
My work is rooted in Nigeria, but not always in its expected visual language. I do not paint dancers or masks or ancestral symbols, not because I reject them, but because they are not the symbols of my daily life. Instead, I paint what haunts and humours me: warped faces, wagging tongues, slumped postures of the absurd and the exhausted. My Tongue Wagging Slobs emerged from this space; a pandemic stillness, a need to shout without words, a need to laugh while grieving. They are caricatures of the human condition, loud, strange, tender, unapologetically honest.
I am interested in the tension between the beautiful and the grotesque, the playful and the profound. Whether through paint, collage, sculpture, or space, I aim to document my lived experience with sincerity , even when it’s silly, even when it stings. My work does not seek permission; it seeks connection.
Art, to me, is not escape. It is excavation, a digging into self, into culture, into contradiction. It is a language I spoke fluently before I had words. Through it, I reassemble my world, mark by mark, image by image, line by fractured line.
