UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #932

Overall Research Project Description Contoured Identity
How can we articulate the effects that movement has on our experiences and sense of self?
My work seeks to depict and thus capture the human experience by portraying it as inherently dynamic, exchangeable, and in a constant state of flux.
By exploring the boundaries of abstraction, landscape, printmaking, texts, and figuration, my work delves into our lived experiences, investigating how forces like migration and capitalism shape human identity, sense of self, and other possibilities.
My art-based research comprises eight mixed media works which bring together elements of repetition of texts/numerals, figuration and contour maps of specific regions inspired by colonial and political history—weaving past with present.
The repeated passport numbers and juxtaposed contour maps establish the underpainting, which I employ to respond to themes of longing, belonging and refusal referencing The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King, which describes that the shoal functions as a spatial allegory for the moving and shifting space of the human. Rather than a place of safety, the intersections, overlap and disintegration is an unstable ecozone and nervous landscape where boundaries between the concept of self and human identity continually shift.
Describing the components of my work;
-The texts: These are mainly imagined passport numbers and currency serial numbers applied as patterns originally conceived from the plaid design of the Ghana-Must-Go tote bag, a bag which gained its name in 1983 following Nigeria’s expulsion of West African migrants, largely Ghanaian citizens, who had entered the country during a period of economic prosperity. Over forty years later, the bag continues to be a powerful symbol of migration worldwide and I employ it as a visual metaphor for migration and capitalism by deconstructing its patterns with text.
- The Imagery: These are drawings and paintings of fellow International students referencing the Balsall Heath photographs in Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, similar to identification photos in function and format that cannot be overseen.
- Contour maps: These maps are layered or juxtaposed to represent the multiple layers of identity shaped by experiences and environmental influences. The contour maps are selected from specific locations where the painted subjects have lived or traversed. They are generated using the QGIS software application.
From a personal and collective perspective, these elements both aesthetically and conceptually embody the politics of landscape and migration, the hierarchy of passports, landscape and currencies all of which shape our collective experience .