Elizabeth Sekyiamah: SKIN + MASKS, Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.

Elizabeth Sekyiamah (b. 2002, Ghana) is a Abstract-Figurative Artist whose work is rooted in visual explorations of movements and patterns associated with domestic rituals. 

Sekyiamah’s compositions serve as gathering places for a range of symbolic, abstract, and figurative elements that together express the poetry and humanity of her daily life. Gestural lines explode in a starburst, each mark echoing the motion of a body at work. Geometric shapes and patterns swarm together, twisting, overlapping, sometimes overtaking the foreground and sometimes receding into the back. suggesting the never-ending ebb and flow of energy and rest. 

Occasional female bodies appear in her paintings— these are representations of Sekyiamah, her mother and sister working at home, as well as generalized depictions of Black women. Sekyiamah considers her work to be feminist in its outlook, as it celebrates in an egalitarian manner the roles women play in uplifting society. 

Every mark, shape, pattern, form, and gesture speaks to the rituals of Sekyiamah’s life in Ghana. Even the color worlds in her paintings are inspired by her psychological and emotional reaction to her lived experience. 

“My work is about domestic lives,” says Sekyiamah. “It’s inspired by daily actions, me waking up, working, everything we do. It’s continuous. Visually it repeats itself. I pick my colors from things around me. That’s where my inspiration is from. Bright colors represent happy moments , dark colors represent something else.” 

Challenging any simple reading of her paintings, Sekyiamah deftly mobilizes juxtaposition throughout her process. The silkiness of acrylic paint is juxtaposed with the roughness and earthiness of chalk; the flatness of each individual layer is confounded by the mounting volume of illusionary space created as the layers overlap; geometric forms and structures blend seamlessly with organic and biomorphic shapes and forms; when seen together in a group, the repetition of certain recognizable abstract elements from painting to painting imbues Sekyiamah’s visual language with a sense of deeper symbolism and metaphor. Her paintings simultaneously occupy objective and non-objective space, elevating the ritualistic mundanity of human  existence in a way that is natural, and full of hope.