PROMPT 1

With previous work which explored landscape, I'm interested in how Susan's discussion of nostalgia relates to that. “Narrative is ideological both in its unsaid quality and in the fact that its descriptive power lies in its ability to make visible, to shape the way we perceive our relation to that landscape” (Susan Stewart, 1993) In some years ago, my mum used to prepare snail soup to welcome her old friends and family. Snail has always been expensive because of its nutritional facts and health benefits so she loved it. After she picks the meat from the shells, she then throws them away. This had kept on happening for several years even before I went to art school. It then happened again and it put a question into my mind, what is my role as an artist to transform these shells that are thrown away?

I began to analyze how the snail soup is made to serve visitors and how it gives them a sense of pleasure. I started thinking about spectators as visitors and that they could also have the same pleasure if I create art out of these shells. Uncontrollably obsessed with exhibition at that time, I was imagining an art exhibition space as a place where people have pleasure, a place where all fantasies, heart desire or dreams could be displayed. I started collecting more of the shells from market places, sometimes my friends would escort me, mostly my friend Alvin who is currently at Yale University. This was the time that I was getting rid of painting in my artistic practice, even though my background in painting hasn't fully gotten out of my entire. With a strong interest in landscape, I began to use shells which I painted to suggest a sense of transformation, thus a kind of new life given to them. As a painter color was the ultimate medium to immortalize the shells.

In final year, first semester as an undergraduate student, I got an email in one evening, reading that I have been invited to participate in a group exhibition with artists such as Ibrahim Mahama, Benard Akoi Jackson and Jeremiah Quarshie. I was so excited to see how the shells would be viewed in the exhibition space. I told my mum that I would want to take a palm tree to the exhibition space. She laughed and asked how possible that was going to happen. I told her to help me. She hired some strong men to uproot a palm tree for me. After that show, the same palm tree was taken the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra

This work allows me to think about nostalgia in terms of revisiting those experiences that inspired me to work with the shells which gave me an opportunity to introduce me into art exhibition. In Susan Steward talks about Nostalgia as a "desire for desire". I have come to understand that nostalgia could also be a bad experience, a feeling of pain due to loss but also with a longing or desire that such loss particularly a person could come back. I thought that my mum would feel disappointed in me when I stopped painting but she never did.  

There were also some other old materials and various household objects that my mother never wanted to throw away, with belief that they could be used some day in the future. In our house storage room were two old refrigerators within which my mum used to keep old materials. When I began to work with the fridge, I reflected back to that experience by trying to navigate the difference between what she was doing and what I'm doing now. It then occurred to my mind that it is a matter of realizing myself as an artist and how an artist could decide if something is art. This motivated me to collect all kinds of objects and exhibit them in the fridge.

"Memory, at once impoverished and enriched, presents itself as a device for measurement, the ruler of narrative" (Stewart, pg 24)

Below are the types of fridges that were kept in the store room, that were taking a new role different from the original role of a fridge.