Love, fight, paint: in the ring with Betty Ogundipe

I meet Betty Ogundipe in a boxing ring in North Kensington, and watch in awe as the 23-year-old artist picks up a pair of boxing gloves and proceeds to kick, skip and throw punches with enviable elegance.

As I watch Betty in action, I debate with myself about how we view artists. It’s a rare thing to observe an artist outside of their studio, to watch them do something so seemingly removed from painting or sculpting, yet whose physicality and force is utterly inextricable from it. The camera clicks and suddenly the photoshoot is over. I snap out of my daze, and we head around the corner for a pink lemonade. En route we discuss Betty’s time at art school and how she feels being free of prescribed briefs from her professors: “Now I decide what I’m doing. I don’t operate off feeling inspired, I just work”.

Being the same age, I thought it best to kick things off with a classic of the secondary school sleepover genre, “kiss, marry, kill: painting, sculpture, photography”. To my relief, she bit. “I would kiss sculpture, marry painting and kill photography. I really would [kill photography] because, as human beings, we are too desensitised to photographs now. Truth is being taken out of the photograph”. A couple of minutes into the interview, it becomes clear that Betty is an artist and sportswoman in equal parts.

Betty has fought – and made art – her whole life as a means to communicate. She corrects the assumption that her works are about “identity”. She is concerned with “self expression”; her art is derived from how she feels rather than who she is. Betty’s first memory of making something was a drawing for her mother who was going to the dentist. In this case, Betty wanted to communicate her “worry” about her mother’s appointment.

MMA and Muay Thai (“The Art of Eight Limbs”) are Betty’s combat sports of choice. They help to manage and foster her relationship with physical and mental resilience. Martial arts of course require a huge degree of discipline, a type of discipline that feels familiar when we think of the life of an artist, the discipline required of them to – come rain or shine – will themselves into the studio to embrace their craft. Betty completed her Art Foundation at Central Saint Martins and went on to the Slade in 2024. Though only recently freed from the imposed structures of art school, Betty’s experience of the London art scene post-graduation has been mixed. “I feel like people are trying, but London, as a city, does not lend itself to inclusivity or community. There’s still too much competitiveness and it’s very capitalistic. So when we do have community, it’s amazing… we really have to fight for it”.

She claims, humbly, that she “wouldn’t be able to take Muhammad Ali.” I have my doubts. While Ali is sadly no longer around to settle this, Betty’s upcoming exhibition, ‘LOVE/FIGHT’ at Tache Gallery in Fitzrovia (her first-ever solo show), is evidence enough of her strength as both an artist and a fighter. Her posing of the question ‘How do we protect ourselves and resist, particularly as women?’ through the mediums of painting, sculpture and installation, is compelling. With or without 6’3” male fighters to prove it.

To Betty, the answer begins in the tensions that swirl around in her art. As “extensions of herself”, the artworks have the capacity to embody traditional distinctions, or binary generalisations, forced between women and fighting… women and great art. Namely, Bound to Fight (2024), Sparring 1 (2025) and Untitled (2022), all of which will feature in the upcoming exhibition, portray women in these apparently “dualistic” states. Highly pigmented – almost neon – greens, pinks and yellows abstract these female figures in strokes and slashes. Each body dominates its canvas while their limbs blend into boxing gloves.

Combat is one way Betty literally fights for her life as an artist. She explains that “the actual training process [ fighting] is very energetic… you don’t have time to think about anything else… you’re very present”. This feeling, underpinned by physicality, “can be translated into how energetic and fast my paintings are mapped out and then done” (typically in a few hours).

‘LOVE/FIGHT’ is a vibrant confrontation with femininity, Black womanhood and memory. It culminates in a “manifesto” composed of paintings, sculpted installation pieces and ready-made objects. If you read this visual manifesto the beginning of a story will become clear, one that speaks to Betty’s own experiences of “womanhood, being female and being feminine,” and her notion that while these are three distinct things, none of the experiences that surround them are unique. “To be clear my work is for every single type of woman, that includes trans women. Feminism is intersectional… but I will never speak for anybody else’s experiences”.

If you continue reading this manifesto, visualisations of what it is like to “work out your positioning in a male-dominated world” become decipherable. Each piece is energetic in its approach to gender, whether this energy directs itself towards care or tenderness or resistance. I think that’s the point, they home in on the idea that the human condition is multi-faceted but that the melting point, or emotional balancing act, between loving and fighting is still something that requires exploration. Whilst making the works on show, Betty was concerned with “primal fear” and “instincts”, the former being something that “makes up a lot of a woman’s time outside when she’s walking alone at night”. By putting paint, textiles and other mediums to these “feelings of fear”, without revealing her sitters’ identities, Betty hopes her viewers will feel a sense of unification with other women. Ultimately though, ‘LOVE/FIGHT’ is a cutting insight into the coexistence of love and resistance.

Looking at Betty’s painting, Thinking (2024), I’m reminded of Shon Faye’s latest book, Love in Exile (2025). In the chapter ‘Mother’, Faye discusses society’s mishandling and exploitation of maternal love. This belongs to a larger conversation about mothering in queer communities. Betty and I talk briefly about the various ways a maternal figure can take form in your life, ultimately agreeing that the image of the mother is one that easily embodies the imposed binaries surrounding loving and fighting. Mothers are expected to balance tenderness and strength, softness and harshness, and other dualities that impose equilibrium whilst society manipulates and makes demands of their love. I ask Betty if she thinks there is a specific artist or artwork that has presented motherhood powerfully. She answered instantly: No Woman, No Cry (1998) by Chris Ofili. The painting portrays the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a man murdered in 1993 and whose investigation was widely declared institutionally racist. “It’s moving because of its description of tenderness and strength coexisting in a mother who has just lost her son so violently”.

In Betty’s Mother and Baby Unit (2021) and Thinking, we are faced with two stages of motherhood: pregnancy and caring for a young child. Betty clarifies that her work does not portray real sitters, rather they “come from imaginary drawings”. She uses the pregnant woman in Thinking as a way to describe how subjects come to her. Her process starts with the polite imperative: “I need an image.” “I’ll sit in my studio… and think of an image that will help me describe and express exactly what I’m feeling right now… or the experience I’ve just had”. Before the art-making starts, the artist will document things by drawing and writing, taking random pictures and making playlists. “It’s a wide thought process. I need an image that questions ‘how do we protect ourselves?’ I need something that talks about tenderness and combativeness in a way that could be seen as violent. So I start drawing bunnies, and then I start drawing vicious weapons, and then I draw them together until it becomes a painting, genuinely.”

In the era of Netflix’s America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC), Betty’s painting Cheerleader (2022) – a portrait of a faceless athlete, obscured by magenta pom poms – got me thinking. The cheerleader (especially in a British setting) connotes old school domains for women, “fields that are typically designed for the male gaze”. It is easy to question pop culture’s handling of cheerleaders, especially since the rise of rom-com cheerleading films in the early 2000s (think Bring It On: All or Nothing and Fired Up), but as Betty stresses, “we don’t talk about how strong they are”. Despite attempts to shine light on their athleticism, it still feels true that cheerleaders exist in this odd space when considering female strength. “I know that the female body is heavily sexualised, and I know that in images of females, it can’t not be. So how do you strip that back?”

Fighting is as much about your mindset as your physicality. That could also be said for making art. After speaking with her, I get the sense that she is primarily concerned with the viewer’s instinctual reaction and feelings. Betty asks us to play a kind of word association with her work, to consider what we think of when we first look at an image and what comes into our heads. If visiting ‘LOVE/FIGHT’ can be compared to entering a boxing ring, the opponent is first and foremost yourself.