With Tenderness: Abigail Lucien & Emma Prempeh

Tiwani Contemporary is delighted to announce the dual presentation With Tenderness, featuring gallery artist Emma Prempeh and introducing Haitian-American artist Abigail Lucien, in their first UK show. The exhibition probes how, in painting and sculptural installations, both artists render compelling explorations of time, in all its tenses: as archival matter, quotidian event and speculative futurity. 

Abigail Lucien’s abstract floor and wall-based sculptures are informed by their ongoing questioning of “inherited colonial structures and systems of belief and care.” Further themes in this new series include heat as a source of transformative energy, and anthropomorphism as a strand of thought enlisted to discuss land, nationalism and history. Lucien refers to dogs and butterflies respectively in the steel works, Chen Peyi, papilio aristor X and papilio artistor XI. Residual familial memories and ideas around indigeneity coexist in Chen Peyi, which foregrounds the artist’s recollection of the country dog as an inextricable presence within the rural landscape of her youthful memories. The recurring spider web motif in this body of work symbolises the course of life and companionship and in The Wait, butterflies romanticise mortality as they circle towards the heart of the web.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic are nations that contentiously share the island of Hispaniola. In papilio aristophor, the eponymous insect is a swallowtail subspecies of the afrotropical butterfly that moves across both nations but has been cited scientifically to originate from Haiti. For Lucien, the butterfly’s movements transgress and ‘queer’ the boundary between the two nations, with the same sentiment echoed by the work’s placement within the gallery space.

The fabled burning of Lucien’s grandparent’s house is referenced in the floor-based work, Kindling while boule de fwa VI and boule de fwa VII, both double-ended candles, symbolically hold together the contradiction of burning at both ends but being frozen in stillness. This alludes also to the process of working with steel, which goes through a softening process to manipulate it into soft fluid, and playful forms as suggested in the work e.s.p., featuring cats animated by the flight of butterflies, their playful tumbling and the rippling of red ribbons.