Emma Prempeh: Belonging In-Between
Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos
From March 6th until May 24th, 2025
Emma Prempeh’s paintings don’t just depict memories – they stage encounters with them. In Belonging In-Between, opening at Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos, Prempeh’s works trace the tangled pathways of migration, inheritance, and belonging, drawing from her mother’s long-awaited return to St. Vincent in the eastern Caribbean after four decades away. “I’m at the stage of still trying to figure out what home means to me,” Prempeh reflects. “But the in-between has become a state that allows me to ask challenging questions about where I want to belong.” This in-between – neither arrival nor departure, neither rootlessness nor permanence – defines both her lived experience and her artistic practice. Through layered pigments, flickering projections, and the slow alchemy of oxidising schlag metal – an imitation of gold leaf – her paintings capture the shifting nature of memory itself.
Prempeh’s paintings, layered in deep blacks and rich greens, serve as evolving records of the past. Over time, her metallic surfaces shift and decay, emphasizing the instability of memory – how it morphs depending on who’s telling the story. This sense of transformation extends to her use of projections, which introduce a ghostly flicker to her already cinematic compositions. This sense of change extends to her use of projections, an aspect of her practice that adds a ghostly flicker to her already cinematic compositions. “Projection remains a way for my work to be more than just painting,” she explains. “It can move, it can become transient.” The act of looking itself becomes unstable, mirroring how memories surface and recede.
Eventually, the walls could no longer contain her. Traditionally drawn to interiors – spaces imbued with domestic intimacy and psychological weight – Prempeh steps outside, literally and figuratively. “I realised as I was exploring interiors that nature plays a big role in the experience and identity of each country I travel to,” she reflects. “Why was I excluding the importance of landscape in relation to what home is?” This realisation led her to confront her own hesitations about depicting the natural world – an admission that feels almost ironic, given how seamlessly and beautifully she now integrates it into her work. Trees, fields, and coastlines are integral to her evolving sense of place and belonging.
There is a distinctly matrilineal thread running through Belonging In-Between. Prempeh paints her mother and grandmother with a gaze that is both reverent and investigative, peeling back layers of inherited history. “I feel most of us don’t truly know who our parents are,” she muses. “This journey unintentionally uncovered parts of them that remained hidden for a long time.” The paintings are not just representations but excavations, unearthing stories that might have otherwise remained buried beneath time’s sediment.
Her approach to painting is at once archival and poetic. “A thought is fleeting,” she notes, “but a painting has permanence.” And yet, in many ways, Prempeh embraces the opposite – welcoming impermanence through the slow decay of materials and the ephemeral glow of projected imagery. It is this tension between fixity and flux that gives her work its quiet, hypnotic power.
In Belonging In-Between, Prempeh offers us a reflection on the diasporic experience that is neither tragic nor romanticized. Instead, she embraces its contradictions: the loneliness and the richness, the fragmentation and the synthesis, the urge to return and the impossibility of truly doing so. “I’m not sure how each individual recalls memories, for myself they sometimes bleed into one another or arrive like flashbacks when a piece of the puzzle is missing,” she says. Her paintings, much like memory itself, resist linearity. They shimmer, they leak, they hold us in their in-between spaces.
For an artist whose practice is built on looking back, Prempeh is remarkably forward-facing. Her ambitions – to create imagined worlds free from photographic reference, to push her experiments with projection, to deepen her exploration of the metaphysical – reveal an artist in perpetual evolution. “I want to paint what I see in my head,” she says, “to transport ourselves into colorful visual realms without using our eyes.” With Belonging In-Between, she draws us into that elusive threshold between experience and memory, a space we sense but cannot quite hold onto.
For further information tiwani.co.uk.
