Back-and-Forth: Cutting Our Coats According to Some Cloths and Other Smaller Things …
- Back-and-ForthCutting Our Coats According to Some Cloths and Other Smaller Things …
This text and image contribution is a conversation between Dorothy Akpene Amenuke and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, contemporary Ghanaian artists, whose bodies of work straddle the academy and the field in almost equal measure. On the one hand, it focuses on their respective artistic praxes, exploring the actual and potential relationships between them, and on the other, investigates their pedagogical strategies and how their approaches to work influence their teaching and other forms of knowledge dissemination. The text emanates from a two-way interview between the artists and is punctuated by anecdotes about, and photographs of, their work ranging between the years 2014 to 2019. Themes that are tackled include, but are not limited to, collaboration, materials, techniques, and aesthetic concerns.
Much has been discussed about your production strategies and the way you invite different groups of people into your studio to help with aspects of the work. You work with family, volunteers, and even students. What is the motive behind this mode of working?
As art is not just about objects but about issues and people anywhere and everywhere, much of my work engages the everyday and several individuals. Materials are mostly familiar ones that are experienced in day-today activities and could be easily taken for granted. Contemporary art enables a condition of interdisciplinary approaches to working and this is pragmatically implied when many people with varied ideas are involved. The different people come to my work with their various abilities, skills and experiences. Also, having my studio located within my home makes it possible for my family to be almost always present, ready to help and be part of my artmaking and life. My need of extra hands is due to the scale of works produced. It necessitates the use of volunteers who may not necessarily have formal art education or background. They may be into other informal art or craft practices, or none at all, but this gives me the opportunity to exchange some new skills with them, as they also bring along many teachable methods into my space. Sometimes, undergraduate students of Fine Art from my classes, whose interests lie in my mode of working, come to assist in my studio. As my ideas and work tend to touch on issues of the everyday, my interest is in how other people come to it individually. The works thus have the touch or opinions of others as a constituent part. My scroll series for instance, started with The Scroll (2016) (Fig. 1), which was created by repeatedly casting a door in my house seven times, with handmade papers realized from a hand-made paper workshop organized by Professor Mary Hark from Wisconsin University. These doors were then stitched together by some members of my family and other studio assistants (Fig. 2). The inspiration for this work stems from a common saying—"broken door falling off"—in my home which calls attention to things/ issues that need repairs/critical consideration. The ultimate motive may probably be to get people to understand the extent to which art involves anyone and everyone anywhere.
Can you share the way you work, in terms of material, approach to technique and, in recent times, teaching?
I have come to realize that my interests in material have been driven by "indifference" per kąrî'kạchä seid'ou, and a noted disregard for a "hierarchy of media," even though I did not necessarily refer to it in those specific terms. My engagement with the blaxTARLINES KUMASI community has, however, drawn my attention to these, and now the ideas are crystalizing around those particular terms. Working from such a point of departure then gives me the freedom to engage whatever is available (or if unavailable, could be imagined or invented), as the materials with which to work. In truth, I'll suggest that I have an enigmatic relationship with materials—no particular material can be assigned to my practice. This way, I find that we have similar ways of working...
