“I felt like I wasn’t keeping up with everyone; for the teachers, it was always about technical stuff and so I lost interest. I feel like I wasn’t actually good at it.”
Finding her creative footing didn’t come as easy as expected for the designer who moved from Lagos to London aged eleven, attending an all-girls school. Despite rendering an ethereal degree-collection, her introductions to fashion deviate from the customary ‘I always knew…’ parlance, to a cursory stint at painting – “I felt the skill overtook me over as the years kept going by,” – a somewhat sagacious child. With an interest in art absent within her family and trips to galleries truant fantasies, Atta kindled her fascination elsewhere. “It was more in the classroom that I began drawing stuff,” she remarks. “I was really shy and I didn’t have many friends so people would ask me to draw stuff and that would be really exciting.” But in a cycle of verbal reproval, Atta was met with discouragement throughout her creative endeavours. “I felt like I wasn’t keeping up with everyone; for the teachers, it was always about technical stuff and so I lost interest. I feel like I wasn’t actually good at it.”
Overlooking their hesitation, Atta became enchanted by the prospect of working on the body. An unexplored terrain in her work, her curiosity was timed with the soaring accessibility of the internet, citing the cosmic network as the stimulus for her interest in fashion. “It’s quite a different introduction to fashion, compared to generations before us,” she speaks of the digital catalyst. “Just having that access to like crazy archives from a young age. I began asking myself more questions; what do I want to look at?” Embracing the utopianism of the internet’s manifold archives, Atta, commencing her diagnostic foundation year at CSM – much to her teachers’ surprise – began traversing the use of sculpture, a form that lends itself to her voluminous collection. “My interest in fashion was always separate from looking at things and observing.” Her creative process, as a result, is quite a systematic one: “I divide my research into different parts, from mood, color, shapes, and then I start to make and drape. I surround myself with loads of images related to the theme and mood. But I don’t go back to it too much. It’s more about having the memory of it and trying to build on from that.”