Okoyomon’s penchant for botanical installations comes from their grandmother, a seed-saver who taught the artist how to tend to gardens and, in doing so, introduced them to a practice of care, place-making, and archiving. “I’m always thinking about archive time,” says the artist. “How do you make new time frequency? I make these spaces with my gardens, specifically, that really do alter the frequency of time and space in that small fragment of a moment.” In their installation, To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), Okoyomon installed figurative sculptures made of raw wool, dirt, and blood within an ecosystem of kudzu and sugarcane. Each of the elements in the work pointedly reference the history of forced migration, labor, and diaspora during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: from the kudzu vine, introduced to the United States in 1876 and later declared an invasive species, to the sugarcane, which recalls the sugar plantations of the American South. In their installation, the sun eats her children (2023), Okoyomon filled a deconsecrated ninth-century church with toxic plants like stinging nettle and jimson weed. One work within the garden, The Sky Is Always Black, Fort Mose (2023), consists of Purple Emperor and Blue Morpho butterflies that live, reproduce, and die in the installation, with the title referencing an 18th-century settlement of formerly enslaved Black people. The dualities of beauty and danger, life and death, and freedom and enslavement in the installation reflect the subtle violence that is omnipresent in society. 

Throughout their practice, the artist reworks stuffed animals into vessels that reflect on racialization, innocence, and the human subconscious. Their installation for the 2026 Whitney Biennial, Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid, features 55 figures sewn together from stuffed animals and taxidermied bird wings, suspended in the air by nooses. Okoyomon’s dark and angelic figures sit in contradiction, both hanging and flying, dead and eternal, eerie and cute. In their 2025 exhibition, It’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world, the artist situates cartoonish, oversized bears in a variety of sexualized tableaus, asking viewers to contend with the discomfort of this collision. Each bear serves as a mirror to the viewer’s inner world (much as stuffed animals do for children), reflecting tensions between empowerment and vulnerability. “With cuteness comes violence. With innocence comes destruction,” states Okoyomon. “What does it mean to know that? To live with it? To have it be in the body?”