PEER presents the first major solo exhibition in a London institution by Hackney-based artist Tanoa Sasraku. Merging digital and handmade processes, Sasraku works with sculpture, tapestry, print and analogue film to explore place and memory in relation to British, Black, Ghanaian and queer cultural histories. Merging digital and handmade processes, Sasraku works with sculpture, tapestry, print and moving image to explore place and memory in relation to British and Ghanaian history.
Tanoa Sasraku, Production image, 2022
For her exhibition at PEER, Sasraku presents a series of works that comprise sculpture and print. Lining the gallery floor are five freestanding rectangular wooden sculptures. Embedded within the monolithic black cases are sheets of hand-made Awagami Kozo Natural Japanese Paper, each depicting enlarged scans of fragments of stitched and embossed ink and earth pigment-stained newsprint, representing elements of an ongoing series of smaller works that Sasraku calls Terratypes (2022).
Produced in parallel to the Terratypes series, Sasraku’s sculptural works presented at PEER act as a framing device for the reproduced images as if now seen under a microscope. The thin, almost flesh-like sheets of Kozo paper subtly move and buckle under their own weight and moisture, each hosting a unique image of newsprint marked by Sasraku’s needle and embossing work, and stained with earth pigment foraged from Dartmoor, Devon, and Isle of Skye, Scotland.
Larger-than-human scale yet bodily in their stature, the Liths dominate the gallery forming a magnetic tension between each other, and directing the viewer through the space. Each Lith bares the marks of Sasraku’s process of making, one that is deeply embedded in personal affinities toward landscapes that represent both a possible threat, as well as provide relief to her body, and act here as a surrogate for Sasraku’s own image.