Suowari’s large-scale portraits are certainly eye-catching, and they’re even more impressive on closer inspection when you realise that they’re created with a humble ballpoint pen. The detail is stunning, and the figures in the canvases are full of emotion and character, often sporting colourful clothing and jewellery and intricate hairstyles (‘I’m fascinated with hair. There’s something about African hair that is very versatile; we have so many styles and expressions.’) Suowari trained as a traditional painter at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, but ultimately felt unsatisfied with the medium. She later turned to her childhood hobby of drawing (primarily on the back of her school science books) with a ballpoint pen, and found that, finally, she could express herself through precise lines and layering.

‘I like to look at each stroke as the human experience,’ Suowari explains of her portraits. ‘One experience, one stroke – and the gathering, and layering, and falling together creates the person and their character.’

Suowari knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of five, and has been a recognisable name over the past 12 years. But despite the ballpoint pen still being the core of her work, the catalyst of her aforementioned “reinvention” is to become a multidisciplinary artist.

The Way They See Us launches on 1 October and sees 10 new ballpoint pen portraits alongside performance, poetry and installation. This is part of Suowari’s journey into multimedia, something which she explored in Now I Wear Myself. For this exhibition, Suowari – despite having no filmmaking training or experience – made an accompanying short film, Of Lines and Layers, which was nominated for a prize at the prestigious Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards. Now I Wear Myself was a deeply personal project for Suowari, which challenged taboo subjects like depression and shame in Nigerian culture. The Way They See Us is something of an extension of this but with a more ambitious and fantastical narrative. It centres on three protagonists from fictional Nigerian tribes and explores themes of prejudice, identity and acceptance.

Nigeria is home to hundreds of different tribes, each with its own history, status and traditions, as well as over 500 languages. Suowari tells me: ‘I’ve travelled a lot around Nigeria and I realised that each region is almost like living in a different country.’

The tribes in The Way They See Us may be rooted in reality, but they take on more extreme properties with obstruction to their facial features. Some of the figures don’t have eyes, others don’t have mouths and some even have their entire faces blacked out. It may sound like the stuff of a Jordan Peele film, but the underlying themes are universal. Plagues break out in each tribe, Suowari explains, with members having to travel outside of their tight-knit communities to find help from others who are “different” from them.

‘With this new body of work, there is a quirky, scary factor to it, but something that’s supposed to be scary, by the end of the day, ends up being beautiful,’ Suowari explains. ‘The Way They See Us – with this title, I’m addressing differences, perception, and generally what it feels like to be an outsider. Everybody has been an outsider at some point in their life. Not necessarily because of the colour of their skin or their race or their gender – but something has made you feel like an outsider, like you don’t quite belong.’

In this exhibition, as with her previous show, Suowari is keen to connect with young people and encourage them to ‘embrace their uniqueness and to be their most authentic selves’. In our conversation, we talk about ambition and setting goals, something which Suowari has been doing since childhood.

‘You never know what the universe is thinking when you’re setting those goals,’ she smiles. A solo exhibition in London was one such goal set last year, and she, of course, has several for the near future – including a Time magazine cover and delivering more TED talks.

Right now, she is also embracing the fact that her art is changing: ‘I have to be willing to allow that change. The next three years of my life I’m dedicating myself to new discoveries and new realisations of myself.’

Suowari may no longer be (in her own words) ‘Jacqueline the ballpoint pen artist’, but her exquisite skills as a draughtswoman will always be the heart of her work. Her ideology, she explains, ‘stems’ from her drawings: ‘They come from my ballpoint pen. So, whatever I’m addressing, whatever concepts I have, they come from the concepts that generate in the studio while I’m drawing.’