ARTIST STATEMENT

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Within my artistic practice, I engage painting and the reconfiguration of a travel bag to navigate the complexities of the diasporic reality. i am interested in how memory, identity are carried and negotiated through lived experience. Central to my work is a mass produced plaid tote commonly known as the Ghana Must Go bag, which I use as both material and metaphor. Beyond being my personal travel bag, the Ghana Must Go carries layered histories of migration and displacement, particularly its association with the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria in the early 1980s. Familiar yet charged with memory, it becomes a stand-in presence for the people whose journeys it accompanies across geographic borders.

I contemplate this notion of borders through the interplay of materials and techniques. This is reflected in how my paintings extend beyond the two-dimensional into three-dimensional forms, incorporating sewing and embellishment to further blur the boundaries between art and craft.

Using family photographs and imagined figures as points of departure, I paint my subjects in acrylic, often with limited palettes before sewing them onto the gridded surfaces of Ghana Must Go bags. Emerging from and receding into the folds of the material, the direct gaze of the figures assert presence, dignity, and agency. I then cut and shape the totes into forms that evoke textiles and architectural structures, activating personal and collective memory. I further embellish the works with rhinestones, sequins, and beads in an effort to elevate both the bag and the individuals whose lives and journeys it carries.

Through these sculptural paintings, made from the transformation of a utilitarian object, I seek to recognize the beauty and resilience in the quotidian, as we are continually shaped by movement and change.