Personal and communal items tend to be repositories of oceans of identity and curiously carry enough messages from the owners. Clothes and other personal objects of adornment, for example, not only cover the individual's body by leaving it at the point of the reterritorialized, but become a vehicle for conveying the content of spatiality— psychic subjectivities.
Re-use of the personal, communal, and/or public thus brings about the deconstruction of the owned into the reconstitution of a spatial and temporal entity. This would be for interaction—a space of negotiation, which in Rogoffian terms, constitutes inhabitation, and may be referred to as an 'antechamber'. In the deconstruction, objects and spaces of intimacy are opened for investigation and then reconstituted into new relationships between materials, persons, and the objects/spaces that resulted from the interactions.
The natural, psychological, and/or metaphoric "space" is thus a very important factor when I create. My works tend to draw attention to the way space is occupied and inhabited. Spatiality thus becomes an inevitable ingredient when I investigate the dynamics of personal and public space. I explore the fine line between the physical, psychological, and metaphoric spaces in human existence and responsibilities. I continually, in my works, question the identity of the individual in today's transnational global society.
Working mainly with fibres and fabrics, I create work that act as allegories to women and issues that concern them. Not focusing on only women, I extend my engagement to the entirety of humanity. The processes, as well as the objects or situations that manifest, are done in a bid to explore the balance between control and spontaneity. My art involves the literal manipulation of fabrics and fibres into objects and spatial installations that evoke feelings of containment and protection or even subtle repulsion. Devotion, duty, and daring become recurring metaphors in my use of materials, laborious processes, and communal strategies in the production of my work. I generally present familiar and unfamiliar objects and installations that evoke contemplation.
Time is an essential component in my work. My processes tend to be laborious, so my sculptures end up embodying the time taken to create them. My long and arduous processes of fiber and fabric manipulation hope to subtly unite the human heart and hand in an unspoken language of symbol and metaphor, which in turn examine the nature of our daily actions, woven through our values. My work thus casts an alternative glance at the practice of sculpture in the contemporary Ghanaian Art context.
Dorothy Akpene Amenuke
Artist