Emma Prempeh

Emma Prempeh is a British artist with Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage. Central to Prempeh’s paintings is the notion of blackness. The color serves as the base of her compositions, and she mines its cinematic quality as a surface onto which she builds traces of experiences, locations, and people, with the intention of conveying the importance of time and our relationship to our ancestry, and also an understanding of selfhood and the ability to transform ourselves. A frequent material employed in her practice is schlag metal, a brass alloy reminiscent of gold leaf, which she applies thoughtfully to her large-scale compositions. The incorporation of schlag metal adds a liveliness to her work; as the paintings age, the metal oxidizes. The images are ever-changing over time; the oxidation of the gold conveys Prempeh’s preoccupation with the way that time passes, and how we experience this. Personal recollection and experience of memory are fundamental to Prempeh’s approach to art making. This performative, living element to her paintings is reflected also in Prempeh’s exploration of installation and moving image, in which she projects still and animated imagery over her canvas to build out from the canvas into something experiential. She encourages us to have active encounters with her work. ...