By Ifeoluwa Olutayo
Interconnection (2024); Oil, Acrylic and Schlag metal on Canvas.
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary
Photography by Deniz Guzel.
These signs follow those who believe. Signs abound in the landscapes, in the hues, and in the interrogation of memory as it relates to reimagined familial connections.
At Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos, I happened upon all of these signs in a solo exhibition by Emma Prempeh titled Belonging In-Between. This is the second solo exhibition I have attended at this institution, with a solo exhibition by Royal Academician Sikelela Owen titled Where My Gaze Falls capturing my attention in late October of 2024.
These two exhibitions share particular considerations: familial connection, ideas of home as a dynamic place, and our relationship with memory. It’s an interesting link, but where Sikelela’s work dwells on the immediacy of her personal experiences with becoming a parent, experiencing their growth mirrored by her memories of growing up and the public spaces she frequents with friends and family, Emma’s work focuses on experiencing memories anew, memories first owned and related to her (for the lack of a better word) by her mother, Juliet Adams.
Emma Prempeh.
Photography by Ellyse Anderson.
This renewal of memory is built on Emma Prempeh’s first visit to St Vincent, where her mother lived before migrating to London forty years ago. This journey with her mother to formative sites provided Emma with new experiences, reconciling long-told tales with the changes time has enacted on these sites and creating new memories, further imbuing this site with strong emotional connections.
There is much to consider with the questions that movement and settling away from an original homeland brings to mind. What is home for one who lives between worlds? Who is it, and what experiences shape our understanding of a diasporan person? How does making new homes halfway across the world, leaving behind a world where belonging was unquestioned, shape the individual and their relationships? How do we define home? A physical space? One where your loved ones are present? In a situation where loved ones are scattered around the world, are there multiple? What sort of relationship do we have with the homes we leave behind, and what formative experiences did we have in that physical space?
Emma’s work in this exhibition, a capturing of her own first experience of her mother’s formative sites left behind for another life in England, is striking in scale and medium. Emma’s life undoubtedly follows the same patterns; she experiences the same “scattering” with family across North America (the Caribbean), Europe, and Africa. It’s an experience shared by three generations of women in her family: Her, her mother, and her grandmother. This exhibition is described as matrilineal, and it is pretty clear how these questions run from mother to child in two-fold. The connection is also in perception, in how these experiences shape mother and daughter relationships, and in how they are remembered.
As I walked through the gallery, I found myself drawn to the larger-than-life feeling I got from the exhibition space (owing to the space’s layout) and, in turn, from the canvases, like an immersive slideshow of moments and memories precious to the artist.
I felt like I was brought into to experience first hand these immortalised experiences, especially as I looked at Mildred Liked The Water, with Emma’s mother, Juliet, captured in the midst of what I imagine to be her recounting a life long past. The paint run-off gives this moment a dream-like quality, reinforcing Emma’s capturing of this dear memory within a mind’s transient possibilities, like catching lightning in a bottle. The surrounding landscape is beautiful, painting a picture of relaxed activity and tangential stories.
Mildred liked the water (2024); Oil, Acrylic, and Schlag Metal on Canvas.
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary
Photography by Deniz Guzel.
Emma Prempeh’s use of Schlag metal on particular points in her paintings is, as described, layering a chemical process to further broaden the conversation of time’s effects on our memory and its representations. Schlag metal, a metal leaf made from a brass alloy and used for gilding, is subject to an oxidizing change over time, and in her pieces, they create slow, live visual changes that provide new ways to experience the image placed in front of us, challenging us to reimagine the work as being continuously-in-transit towards new iteration, mirroring the transient nature of remembrance.
Mesopotamia Valley (2024); Oil, Acrylic, and Schlag Metal on Canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary
Photography by Deniz Guzel.
The diptych, Mesopotamia Valley, presents, in magnificent scale, the sweeping landscapes of the town Mesopotamia in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, one that triggers a certain tinge of nostalgia, of longing for a place that feels familiar but you have never visited before. All across the paintings, I find a dazzling portrayal of nature and foliage, one that is beautiful to see and has a calming effect, presenting as human in tune with the green.
This recurring grandness of the image found me experiencing this longing more than once with a diptych like For The Last Time, which evokes longings of home for me; this is the idea of home as a physical structure, one that invokes connections to our past lives in what corroborative elements remain in their edifices to bridge that connection.
The diptych, What Once Was, has some of the same effects, with a certain sadness (implied in the name) to the distanced gaze of the figures looking at the last whispers of a structure that (possibly) housed so many (un)pleasant memories. I resonated with these ideas, as one who, like many, has experienced the loss of physical altars to our past.
For The Last Time (left), This Likkle Piggy (centre) & What Once Was (right) [2024]
Oil, Acrylic, and Schlag Metal on Canvas (all three)
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary
Photography by Olayinka Eno Babalola.
This idea of structures as physical altars is no more powerful anywhere than in Seventh Day Adventist, where the church occupies a large portion of the diptych, evoking in me the grandness of the religious connection and hope that binds (and sometimes breaks) families. The binding is way more interesting, as it represents a way to connect with family miles away, knees bowed, supplicating across continents. The beauty of shared worship.
It also had that same feeling of nostalgia, of longing for a place that feels familiar and safe at a particular juncture in my life. It brought back memories of my weekly presence at a similarly large and meaningful structure in my childhood; Decross Gospel Mission, with its flat roofs and washed-brown colours, was the church where I was dedicated. I, too, like Juliet, will possibly find a reckoning with the changes time has inflicted on this structure in return.
Dinner in Vancouver (left), Seventh Day Adventist (centre) & Juliet Adams (right) [2024]
Oil, Acrylic, and Schlag Metal on Canvas (all three)
Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary
Photography by Olayinka Eno Babalola.
Emma doesn’t fail to capture intimate moments in the work of display, with paintings like Dinner in Vancouver and Iris Lusiana Bristol representing a certain gratitude for community and companionship.
I found the entire experience to be an immersive, thought-provoking capture of instants and an open conversation about memory, which also gave form to the artist’s technical considerations. I hope to experience the work anew as Schlag Metal and I grow older over the next couple of weeks, connected by our dependencies on oxygen to thrive and evolve.
Narratives abound, and signs were present.
Memories and their transient nature, structures remembering lives, maternal connections, and an appreciation of the community freely given by family and friends.
