Theresah Ankomah’s work explores the intricacies of ‘weaving’ through complexities of ‘craft’ in relation to trade and how underpinning issues of geopolitics, gender and capitalism resonate in the everyday usage of materials and objects.
Through her work, the idea of weaving moves beyond the confinement of beauty, name tagging such as ‘Feminist works’, primitive and the functionality of objects to explore more complex issues such as consumerism, geopolitics, gender, identity and capitalism. She vehemently believes that everyday objects are not innocent in themselves but coexist within a physical space with seen and unseen collaborators. This she lives through layers of process her materials go through from the start till the end. She says, “process of my work is as equally important to me as the final product which is the installation”.
In her work, weaving captures the concept of conceiving one’s identity by combining separate entities into a disjoint body of work. By way of assembling and disassembling of the objects (woven objects), splitting and collaging, joining and weaving, her body of work becomes an appropriation of individual weaves collected from various encounters, people experiences and narratives.
Theresah Ankomah