Wandering Under a Shifting Sun

Emma Prempeh It Begins Here, 2024
Photo: Deniz Guzel. Copyright of the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.

Emma Prempeh 

Tiwani Contemporary, London  (3 October – 16 November 2024)

Review by Michael McMillan

Wandering Under a Shifting Sun is the first of two solo exhibitions by Emma Prempeh, a British artist of Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage, at Tiwani Contemporary (the second will be at its gallery space in Lagos in early 2025). Here, for the first time, Prempeh meditates on landscape through painting, and how as with previous work it might open a soulful connection to home, belonging and memory. Prempeh sometimes experiments with embedded soundscapes and the projection of moving images in her work, evoking oral traditions unfolding at family and other social events depicted in mixed media on canvas works such as ‘Steal The Rum Cake From the Kitchen’ (2023), ‘And So On’ (2022) and ‘Go Liming’ (2022).

The exhibition opens in a living room installation setting: a two-seater upholstered settee in front of a TV plays a video made on a recent visit Prempeh made with her mother to St Vincent. We hear stories of growing up there, migrating to Britain and returning ‘back home’. Adorning this installation is a drapery of white lace framing a large-scale painting, ‘It Begins Here’ (2024), portraying three generations seated in the living room as Prempeh and her mum listen to the grandmother holding court. Prempeh’s practice is grounded in the matter of blackness, and here as in other work, she begins with an earth-coloured backwash whose tonal properties invoke ancestral time in the lives of black people; their being,  relationships, selfhood and becoming.

The next space has several landscapes also painted in 2024 and based on Prempeh’s visit ‘back home’. In the first, ‘What’s Left’, her mother in the centre foreground of the painting has her back to us, so we see what she sees, surveying where she was born and grew up in Richland Park, as four spectral pairs of eyes hidden amongst foliage look on. In the second, ‘Meeting at Richland Park’, mum chats with a childhood acquaintance, who wrongly suspects that she has returned to claim the family land, while the projected moving image of a bird flies past and a palm tree flutters in the wind. A third landscape, ‘Pipedream’, draws on Prempeh’s visit to see her dad in Ghana. Looking out of a large unfinished window in his unfinished ‘mansion’, he admonishes a woman passing by about using a water standpipe on his land. Each work speaks in different, but similar ways to the past ever present in a future imagined from diaspora, in which land, ownership and memory are often contested. Flashes of gold in passing clouds suggest both the passage of time and altered vision – achieved through Prempeh’s use of schlag metal in selected areas of her large-scale paintings as that brass alloy of copper and zinc imitative of gold leaf slowly oxidises and changes colour. 

 Prempeh’s personal life is divided between London and Kampala, Uganda, where she has become part of the extended family of her fiancé, Alim, as reflected in a series of paintings from 2024. In a downstairs space, ‘Meeting the Family’ and ‘Other Side of the Table’ depict encounters with them, glimpses of glasses toasting. Whereas in ‘(Unspoken Conversation) Kyagwe’ Alim stands beside his mother, their backs to us, looking over the family land, with her posture of assessing what is to be done, and his silent questioning. Alim, like Prempeh, is a last-born child, and his intimate embrace with Suli, a little boy in his family, in ‘Last Born’, the smallest painting in the show, reflects their unique bond. This new world of encounters and transitions is symbolised in ‘Entry Point’, where a single shoe on the floor marks the threshold of leaving a darkened room through a doorway onto a lit verandah overlooking a green landscape. It has become a liminal space between entering and departing, what is known and unknown, between life and death, where ending is also a beginning. 

Wandering Under a Shifting Sun ends where it begins, in a domestic setting, a carpeted living room with a single armchair and a side table adorned with lace covering, framed family portraits and a small bottle of scent, which invites a feeling of homecoming intimacy. There is a portrait of ‘Tante Winnie’s Sister’,  Prempeh’s mum telling family stories in ‘Lydia’s House’, and her dad reclines in ‘The Boys’ Quarters’, temporary accommodation that he has no intention of leaving while his ‘unfinished’ mansion is being built. And across the paintings, we see projected moving images of their scattered and settled lives in the places and cultures they both leave and return to.

https://www.tiwani.co.uk/exhibitions/93-emma-prempeh-wandering-under-a-shifting-sun/overview