In My Own Words

My practice explores the alienation of Ghana's oral storytelling traditions, particularly Kwaku Ananse stories, within today's digitally mediated world. These stories once carried moral instruction, humor, and communal wisdom through shared presence and spoken exchange. As digital technologies increasingly dominate how narratives are circulated and consumed, Ananse's voice risks loss and erasure, transformed from living knowledge into isolated data. Working with stoneware, cables, keyboard keys, cowries, Adinkra symbols, jute rope, metals and found objects, I create sculptural forms that function as material archives. Clay embodies memory, ritual, and cultural permanence, while cables and keyboard keys reference the accelerated, disjointed language of virtual space. Jute rope, like Ananse's web, recalls the networks of connection that once bound communities together through oral tradition. Blackened surfaces and embedded digital remnants reveal the tension between ancestral memory and contemporary mediation. My work questions how technology reshapes communal narratives into solitary interactions and asks what is lost when storytelling is removed from embodied, collective experience. Inspired by Louise Bourgeois's use of the spider as a metaphor for storytelling, creation, and identity, I see Ananse's web as both a fragile and resilient network of narratives awaiting reactivation. Shannon Mattern's writings on maintenance further inform my approach, framing cultural preservation as an ongoing, labor intensive practice. Through materiality, I seek to bridge past and present, reactivating Ananse stories as living dialogues that sustain cultural identity across generations in this digital age.