Enmeshed

This piece engages the artist's concepts of “braiding as re-membering” and “renaturation”, theoretical concepts she developed during her PhD at Cambridge and continue to explore. These concepts consider the reconstitution and reimagining of the African self in the wake of coloniality. It considers the potential for healing from the tangible, embodied, and violence of coloniality on the Ghanaian body, knowledge, and identity. The play on “remembering” is a counter to the device of colonial amnesia, a forgetting of the damage caused on culture and self.

For this work, Yeboah employed acrylic painting, scanning, digital iterations of collaging, layering and the imagery of the braid, overlaid on the figure in a double negative. The background foliage shown is from the gardens around the artist's home in Accra Ghana, and crowns the figure with palm leaves. The motif of the braid, shown on the face and shoulder is a reminder of everyday Ghanaian artistry, as well as the intimate communal connections that create it. Yeboah enjoys the use of inverted images, as it recalls x-rays, scans, and biological imagery, and considers what is happening beneath the flesh, in the interior of the body and self. The braids, in their placement almost look like viscera; like the muscles and the veins under the skin. The direct gaze of the figure confronting the viewer is itself a visual reminder that re-membering is a communal work of substantive action. 

This piece formed part of the work presented in Yeboah's first solo show, Renaturation: Fractured Identities, Future Selves, at The Women’s Art Collection in 2024.