Emma Prempeh, To Nene and Carrie, I'm here again, 2024 Oil, Acrylic and Schlag metal on Canvas. 200 x 160 cm 78 3/4 x 63 in
Tiwani Contemporary Lagos is proud to start its 2025 exhibition programme with the solo show, Emma Prempeh: Belonging In-Between. This suite of paintings continues the latest body of works which finds Prempeh pictorially considering landscape as physical and emotionally charged sites, drawing together the matrilineal experiences and memories of her grandmother and mother Carmen, of whom the latter features very prominently.
The series documents Carmen's return to St. Vincent last year with the artist, 40 years after migrating to London. It was Prempeh's first time in St. Vincent, visiting the homes and spaces that her Mother lived in or were a feature of her childhood and early teens, and for the artist the process of witnessing her Mother revisiting these locations, enacted a reckoning with the present state of those sites and their changes over the years, to the stories her Mother shared with her whilst growing up.
Prempeh's pursuit of understanding what home or belonging means as a diasporan subject, whose current experience is defined in transit - traveling between East and West Africa (Uganda and Ghana), the Caribbean (St Vincent and the Grenadines) and the United Kingdom (London), exposes Prempeh's growing consciousness around the historical, environmental and geopolitical narratives underpinning her observations and travels, revealing greater nuance, and complexity.
Her paintings depicting people, interiors, places, and still and animal life from past and recent memories and events, emphasize and represent the passing of time and the instability of memory. Belonging In-Between features vignettes and sentiments for the places and people that mean a lot to her.
About the Artist
Emma Prempeh lives and works in London. She studied at Goldsmiths University of London graduating in 2019 winning the Alumno/Space bursary award for 2020. She recently attended MA Painting at the Royal College of Art under the LeverHulme Trust Arts Scholarship winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts award for 2022.
The starting point to Prempeh’s paintings is the matter of blackness – the tonal properties of the colour establishes the ground to her paintings and a cinematic basis to invoke and project memories of events, people, and places to emphasise an appreciation of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood and transformation.
Schlag metal, a brass alloy of copper and zinc imitative of gold leaf, is a material that Prempeh applies to selected areas of her often large-scale paintings. Over time this oxidises creating slow, live visual changes that animate the image and create a meta-narrative around our experiences of the passing of time, memory and its representation. Prempeh occasionally experiments with projected still and moving imagery to create painting installations that invite other experiential and performative encounters with her work.
Recent exhibitions include: Conversations, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (group - 2024); Wandering Under A Shifting Sun, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2024); In the Blood, Tiwani Contemporary, London UK (group - 2024); Where Dreams are Born and Peace Restored, Bwo Art Gallery, Douala, Cameroon (group - 2024); In Presence and Absence, Ordovas Gallery, London, UK (solo - 2023); Free The Wind, The Spirit And The Sun, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London UK (group - 2023); With Tenderness, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (group - 2023); You were, you are, and you always will be, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos Nigeria (solo - 2022); In and Out of Time, Ada\contemporary Art Gallery, Accra Ghana (solo - 2021); Raise Your Glass, The Lightbox Gallery and Museum, Woking UK (solo - 2020); The Faces of Love, V.O. Curations Post Residency Solo Show, London UK (solo - 2020) ; On Love, Home by Ronan Mckenzie, London UK (group - 2022); Friends and Family, Pi Artworks, London (group - 2022); At Peace, Gillian Jason Gallery, London UK (group - 2021); Mother of Mankind, Ada \ Contemporary Gallery X Hofa Gallery, London UK (group - 2021); Onward and Upward-Art in The Garden of Life, Droog Gallery, Amsterdam the Netherlands (group - 2020); Redressing the Balance #woman Artists, The Lightbox, Woking UK(group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London UK (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds UK (group - 2019).
Recent exhibitions include: Conversations, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (group - 2024); Wandering Under A Shifting Sun, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2024); In the Blood, Tiwani Contemporary, London UK (group - 2024); Where Dreams are Born and Peace Restored, Bwo Art Gallery, Douala, Cameroon (group - 2024); In Presence and Absence, Ordovas Gallery, London, UK (solo - 2023); Free The Wind, The Spirit And The Sun, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London UK (group - 2023); With Tenderness, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (group - 2023); You were, you are, and you always will be, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos Nigeria (solo - 2022); In and Out of Time, Ada\contemporary Art Gallery, Accra Ghana (solo - 2021); Raise Your Glass, The Lightbox Gallery and Museum, Woking UK (solo - 2020); The Faces of Love, V.O. Curations Post Residency Solo Show, London UK (solo - 2020) ; On Love, Home by Ronan Mckenzie, London UK (group - 2022); Friends and Family, Pi Artworks, London (group - 2022); At Peace, Gillian Jason Gallery, London UK (group - 2021); Mother of Mankind, Ada \ Contemporary Gallery X Hofa Gallery, London UK (group - 2021); Onward and Upward-Art in The Garden of Life, Droog Gallery, Amsterdam the Netherlands (group - 2020); Redressing the Balance #woman Artists, The Lightbox, Woking UK(group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London UK (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds UK (group - 2019).
