Ibiye Camp (she/her) is a British Nigerian artist based in London. Her work engages technology, trade, and material within the African Diaspora, using 3D scanning, film, 3D model making, textiles, and laser cutting techniques. Her new body of work centres on a coastal power ship currently sited in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and explores the language of delicacy, trace, and presence. Thinking through the power ship, she responds to the distinct, disturbing, and upsetting wreckage-like representation created by the .OBJ file (a geometry definition file) format. As a counterpoint, Camp deploys point cloud technology, foregrounding reflections and atmospheres over precise depiction. For Art + Australia, Camp has produced Floating Power Houses, a collection of videos and images highlighting the precarity of temporary power solutions from overseas corporations.

Rhiarna Dhaliwal (RD): The site of your new work, the power ship, highlights friction between the ship, the water, and infrastructure. How did you come to this relationship between power, water, and energy, and what was the starting point?

Ibiye Camp (IC): I’ve been fascinated by this ship since 2017, when I first noticed it in Freetown. I believe it was an agreement between the Sierra Leonean government and a private Turkish company (Karpowership) around the time of the election to stabilise the electricity supply. I wrote about the ship in my Masters of Architecture dissertation, investigating how agreements with overseas corporations, including but not limited to Karpowership, create infrastructural reliance and debt. I see these infrastructures as a new type of imperialism. However, there’s a sense of precarity: the ship provides power, but it can leave at any time—there’s a fragility to their occupation. Spending time in Freetown you hear stories from people saying ‘Oh, the power body is gonna go’. There’s constant hearsay: the ship is on, then reduced, then rumoured to leave after elections. It has the presence of a visitor that will inevitably leave.

RD: Your work explores dualities, transient and precarious, yet large and overpowering. How do you translate those tensions into your work?

IC: The way that I work is also precarious. I often scan spaces with a lot of movement, which shows disruption. Documenting these ships, I try to capture a little of that movement too. You can see details of the rusted base of the ship, but not the large generators due to the distance we were recording from. Another interesting point is that the LiDAR 3D scanning software I use struggles to capture water. So, in the final work, I have simulated water as I want the sensation of a ship being on the ocean, where it could leave the coast at any time. There is a distance and uncertainty with 3D scanning where the scan might not show what I was looking at, which is also interesting.

RD: I love the idea of keeping distance from the ships, yet your work process is on the ground and getting first-hand material. How do you navigate first-hand methodologies and research, and how, in the digital space, do you sustain and play with that distance within the work?

IC: It’s something I’m still critical of. When I first used photogrammetry, I scanned places I was familiar with: top-up kiosks and market stalls that I had relationships with. Elsewhere, like Tema fish market or Takoradi, I asked permission, spoke with traders, and was mindful I was a visitor. In Tema, asking traders I wasn’t familiar with to take photographs of was more tense, however these initial conversations were wonderful and highlighted other tales for the project.

There can often be tension when I enter spaces and communities that I am not a part of. Being on the ground with a mobile phone gives a point of view of the community, and I want to respect that this is someone's livelihood and not be extractive. Using point clouds created using photogrammetry from images captured on my phone generates a trace of a presence rather than any detailed features. Taking photographs on my phone helps as there's familiarity whereas a large LiDAR scanner feels imposing. Many artists have shown caution in their work in this way.

I take inspiration from Kara Walker's silhouettes to draw attention to the physical displacement of the Black body. Awareness of speaking about vast landscapes, communities and even being a visitor requires care. We’re speaking about brutalist infrastructures, but I don't want to work brutally myself.

RD: You mentioned OBJs can form a wreckage of a scan, which you don't want to represent. The point cloud offers more of a trace. How do you work between these two technological tools in practice?

IC: I've become sensitive and critical of representation. These are delicate subjects and people, so I need attentiveness.

OBJs produce a solid mesh suitable for 3D printing. However, OBJs give me an eerie feeling as representing a person through this tool can look like they’re melting or damaged. With point clouds, you're not making a form to 3D print, so elements are allowed to float in space. They're a trace and essence of a space, with distance; they don't show people in great detail. I don't want the work to depict ruins, I want to capture essence and space and how things tie together. Point clouds allow that with delicacy.

In these images and videos for Art + Australia, the reflections in the water also have the same effect—showing reflected infrastructure without depicting it. The water provides softness and shows the precarity of something that might disappear.

RD: There’s a moving textile interrupting and floating across the screen. What role does interruption have in the work, and how should viewers read it?

IC: The textile interruption, though simulated, relates to working with the delicacy of point clouds. I'm exploring other 3D printing forms and ways of representing landscape and typology. I'm testing dyeing fabric with kola nuts grown in West Africa and using traditional mark-making for these textiles. I see these as typologies of the landscape. In the past, I made powder 3D prints, but now I want to work more earthly and true to the landscape I’m referencing. That’s where the interruption comes, exploring this landscape with the earth itself. The technique derives from pelete bite (Kalabari: cut-thread), a Kalabari textile-making method of pulling threads to make new typologies by cutting away fabric. Working with interruptions and voids is my way of bringing the work back to the landscape.

RD: Your work speaks to time and temporality. Are these images documenting a present reality, or a possible future?

IC: The point cloud images, and the way they’ve been documented, are current because things can change in the future. The ship might leave, and that would be a different time. I think it's interesting to have work dated, to show this was a moment in time. Knowing when the work takes place matters because it’s a trace of that moment.

Ibiye Camp: layt de kam will open 17 Jan - 07 Mar 2026 at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.