Some artists create within a single medium. Eje creates across worlds.

A Nigerian interdisciplinary artist, cultural practitioner, and self-described shapeshifting storyteller, Eje Diedjomahor’s practice moves fluidly between visual art, photography, writing, archives, and performance, weaving together history, spirituality, identity, ecology, and memory. Their work resists easy categorisation, instead inhabiting the liminal spaces where myth meets lived experience, where activism becomes art, and where personal stories become collective histories.

For over fifteen years, Eje has been building a practice rooted in curiosity, cultural preservation, and transformation, asking not only how we remember, but who gets remembered, what gets archived, and how storytelling can become an act of healing.

In this conversation, Eje reflects on shapeshifting as a creative philosophy, the power of archives, working across disciplines, and why some of the most important stories live in the spaces between certainty and imagination.

You describe yourself as a “shapeshifting storyteller,” which feels deeply intentional. What does shapeshifting mean to you creatively, spiritually, and personally?
Eje: Yes, it absolutely is deeply intentional. – For me, it means fluidity, movement, surrender to flow, and boundless possibility. As a shapeshifting storyteller, my many forms are all-encompassing – the shapes spill into every aspect of my life. As an interdisciplinary artist, shapeshifting allows me to move across and between mediums and different forms of expression. I began my career as a painter, but as I discovered my shapeshifting powers over the years, I have taken on many other forms: archivist, collage artist, film maker, speculative fiction writer, digital illustrator, photographer and still evolving. Every time I get a new vision that requires a story to be told in a new way that I am unfamiliar with, I undergo a deep transformation in the process of alchemizing that vision. This process is filled by grief, release, research, experimentation, curiosity, devotion and play. The repetition of this process has resulted in my multihyphenate artistic practice.
Overall, shapeshifting has invited me to resist socially imposed norms I don’t align with, and encouraged me to refuse digestibility by hiding behind imposed identities placed on me. My stories and I are constantly evolving, and each transformation is embodied within me and my artistic Spiritual practice. I move through life loosely like water. I surrender to each new expression of self.

Your work exists in what you call “liminal spaces where memory meets myth and activism meets art.” What first drew you toward those in-between spaces rather than more fixed or traditional forms of storytelling?
Eje: I have been called to the in-between my whole life. I have never fit neatly into anything, a box or otherwise. In my youth, I always colored outside of the lines with no desire to do it “right”. Regardless of the negative connotations, I refused to color conventionally. As I grew up and started to understand my practices as largely “storytelling,” the pull towards liminal spaces was natural. In both my personal and artistic life, I’ve always found myself in transit, neither here nor there, always in the space between. Growing up, my family moved a lot, which inspired me deeply. As a result, I became a reflection of my surroundings. This mirroring deeply influenced my Spiritual journey and introduction to shapeshifting. As above, so below…today, I move primarily in the space between worlds.
Aside from my divine direction, curiosity has played a big part in guiding me away from traditional forms of storytelling and of being, in general. In my search for authentic
expression, I often found fixed forms to be constrictive and insufficient, never quite right in expressing what I was trying to share. Shapeshifting and the layering of my personal identities and artistic expressions has allowed me so much expansion and deeper connection to the source and the Spirit of stories and memory.

Across your visual art, photography, writing, and archival practice, there’s a strong sense of preservation, preserving histories, emotions, Spiritual knowledge, and lived experiences. What do you feel most urgently called to archive right now?
Eje: I believe my responsibility is firstly, to tell my own story and secondly, to tell the stories that Spirit places on my heart. Currently, I feel the urgent need to archive stories that are being erased, especially those of marginalized or revolutionary voices – stories that combat the narrative that “this is how it has always been, this is how it will always be, and there is nothing we can do about it”. As a keeper and teller of stories, it is my responsibility to remember. Remembrance looks like archiving. Remembrance looks like resistance and disrupting colonial legacies. Remembrance looks like coming home to myself repetitively and relentlessly in a world that wants me to forget. To me, these acts of preservation mean offering counter histories and committing to breaking generational curses by telling stories of the past and present, while building new future worlds.

A lot of your work feels deeply rooted in both personal memory and collective memory. How do you navigate the tension between telling your own story and carrying communal histories at the same time?
Eje: Thankfully, although there are moments of distinction, there is a lot of overlap between my tellings of personal versus collective memory. I believe that intersection takes the form of collective consciousness. By telling my story, I am telling the stories of others who resonate as well. By carrying my community’s stories, I am carrying my story as well. I am grateful for the venn diagram it creates. Balancing the duality of things by zooming in and out often helps me navigate any tension that may arise. Changing my artistic perspective routinely allows my understanding of memories to be more vast,which offers me the space to carry both communal and personal history.

Your practice moves fluidly across disciplines instead of staying within one medium. Do different mediums allow different truths to emerge, and how do you know which form a story wants to take?
Eje: Absolutely! Each medium is like a new language added to my visual vernacular. The Spirit of the stories tell me which forms and mediums they would like to be expressed through. When that communication is not so clear, I rely on trial and error. When I find the correct match, I can feel it- the story flows more freely or grows more expansively. I am constantly opening myself up to new mediums and learning new shapes of expression to nurture and develop the range required to hold the energy of a shapeshifting storyteller. Another layer is the shapeshifting ripple effect: not only do I shift between mediums and identities, but the resulting creations also shapeshift depending on their audience and container. Inspired by the energy of water, I follow the lead of its examples of flexibility and transformation. A raindrop, waterfall or ocean can tell different tales and secrets… but the truth is that they are all water shifting between shapes. My work embodies that same fluid mystery.

There’s a Spiritual and ancestral current running through your work that feels very embodied rather than symbolic from a distance. How has your relationship with Spirituality shaped the way you create and interpret the world around you?
Eje: When I integrated my spirituality into my creative life, my vision expanded and I began to practice ‘Alchemy and Art’ instead of just a creative hobby. In all I do, I regard Spirit first. Spirit is my source and my ancestors are my guide in every aspect of my life, so my creative interpretation of the world is no different. I see the world through the lens of Spirit. I create from a Spirit center,with direction from the divine. My Spirituality taught me that my art is truly a practice, a devotion, an offering. I approach and regard my work as destined holy practice:It is my destiny to interpret my world and Spirit through the gifts I have been blessed with. I refer to myself as largely a “Spirit taught/led artist” due to the deep relationship my Spirituality plays in my practice. As a spiritual interdisciplinary artist, I see new colors, shapes, forms in the spaces between divinity and humanity. It is a blessing to use a variety of mediums to bring to life the creative ideas I receive as downloads from spirit. The different alchemical processes influence every aspect of my daily life. They help me understand myself and the worlds around me, reflecting me onto the world and the world onto me.

You’ve spent over fifteen years working across art and cultural practice. What has sustained your creativity through changing seasons, identities, and versions of yourself?
Eje: Spirit, especially in the form of the ocean and other water bodies, is my sustainer. Water teaches me to remain steadfast in my devotion to creativity regardless of the season or shape I find myself in. My understanding of the inevitability of change has held my hand through many metamorphoses of self, and by extension, my work. Spiral motifs influence my creativity, they serve as a possibility mode, teaching me so much about non linear progression. The past, present and future all converge at my source and spiral outward …old is new and new is old but change is never linear.

For many creatives, there’s pressure to make work that is easily explained, categorised, or marketable. Your work seems to resist that. How do you protect complexity and experimentation within your practice?
Eje: I ground myself in play and curiosity, which perpetually leads to complex experimentation in my work. It is my artistic responsibility to resist digestibility, conformity, capitalism, and marketability because my work is primarily an offering to Spirit, holy and worth protecting with my life. In turn, this devotion protects and sustains me. I have never liked to explain my work – rather, I’ve allowed it to speak for itself in many languages for over a decade.In this new chapter of exploration, Spirit is inviting me to ground myself deeper in making my work from a place of liberation and resistance. And to speak more complexly – nuance is a natural byproduct of my spiritual technologies manifested as art.

Your artistry often engages with nature and the environment not simply as backdrop, but as presence and collaborator. What conversations do you think exist between the body, land, memory, and Spirit?
Eje: I believe that if you are open to listening, there is a constant conversation between body, land, memory, and Spirit. The same creation energy tethers all four together, and they exchange energy and ideas around community, balance, peace, love, creativity, and identity reflective of the times and environment. When I get still and quiet enough to tune into the frequency of that conversation, it always results in further exploration, experimentation and self -expression. As a storyteller, these conversations between body,
land, memory, and Spirit inform the depth of the details within my narratives. In my practice, the environment serves as a mirror and active collaborative character rather than just a background setting. In my opinion, no story exists in a vacuum. Each one is a reflection of the container it exists in. That is why I work heavily with world building as a medium within my artistic practices. As much as I utilize different mediums like painting, writing or film to construct worlds ; I also regard world building as its own means of creation,a tool in my shapeshifting toolbox just like my pens, cameras, and brushes.

When people encounter your work, what kind of transformation, question, or feeling do you hope follows them afterward?
Eje: My primary hope is that my viewers simply feel…Feel something, feel anything. I hope they allow themselves to feel whatever it is deeply. Anything else other than the act of feeling itself is an extra blessing to me. I hope curiosity follows my audience. I hope they pull the thread of whatever feelings arise, follow the portal that opens for them and see where it leads them because there will always be transformation along the way. Lastly, I hope they remain open to their own discovery… ask questions, interrogate the discomfort that may present itself, and pay attention to whatever story the work is telling them personally.

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