Home From Home: Reclaim, Embalm & Awaken – Enam Gbewonyo

Enam Gbewonyo - Jennifer Moyes Photography

Enam Gbewonoyo is a British-Ghanaian performance and textile artist based in London. Prior to starting a career as an artist she worked as a fashion designer, which informs much of her current practice. She has delivered performances for Christie’s and as part of the collateral programme for the opening week of the 58th edition of Venice Biennale. Additionally, Enam is the founder of BBFA (Black British Female Artist) collective which platforms the work of incredible black women artists who she has come to think of as sister as well as highlighting the lack of diversity and inclusion in the art world.

I first met Enam a few years ago whilst working as an Assistant Curator and she was the first black artist I met and worked within that setting. We instantly hit it off and realised we had crossover in some of our friendship groups. We caught up on zoom only a few days after having a virtual group brunch for a deeper conversation.

Péjú Oshin: Let’s start from the top with a brief overview, how did your practice start and how has it developed over the years?

Enam Gbewonyo: My journey started in 2010, I was working on events magazine with a friend in 2011 and absolutely loving it! in fact, I took a brief hiatus from making art. But in 2013 I got really sick and I was hospitalised. In those moments you start to reassess your life and goals. Being in hospital made me think “who knows how long I’m here for? Let me just do what I’m passionate about”. I decided to walk away as I realised my passion has always been art. I used to work in fashion design in the United States and when I moved back, I wanted to commit myself to art.

In 2015 I founded the Black British Female Artist Collective (BBFA) to start building a platform for us and build awareness around the barriers that black women artists face and how difficult it is for us to break that glass ceiling in the art world. That sisterhood has been important, it’s been part of my growth as an artist and a person. A year later in 2016, I had the idea to work with tights which is now a huge part of my practice.

Enam Gbewonyo, Invisibilty Cloak

PO: Ill health caused you to re-evaluate your priorities and take the decision to commit to art but you’ve been able to maintain a continuity with your previous career as a designer, how has your interest in working tights developed?

EG: I noticed there were a lot of companies founded by black businesswomen creating nudes for black and non-white women of colour, it struck me, how long has it been since tights were first worn and invented? It dates back to the fourteenth and fifteenth century. As my point of departure, I started researching the different ways through history that this piece of clothing has intersected with black women. During the time of slavery, black women were on the cotton plantations growing the cotton that was spun into these stockings that a lot of British gentries would wear to show their wealth. There was a violence that these women endured and is passed through generations.

Fast-forward to the Windrush generation and the sixties when women like my mother moved to the UK to work in the NHS. They wore these tights as part of their uniform, and I started to think again about the trauma they endured through the racism that they faced and how as an article of clothing it holds so much energy which is unspoken.

PO: There is a great depth of research that goes into your work and a conscious effort to connect the dots, what was the experience of developing new relationships in the art world like?

EG: I’d lost contact with the networks I had at a point started to make - it was like starting all over again. If I’m being honest, I found it really challenging as a woman, a black woman; to find space, audiences and platforms. Engagement with the work was also a thing, I’d have conversations with art professionals and audiences who would expect you to make work around your heritage and identity which I found really frustrating because that’s not all of who I am, I’m a very complex person as is everyone else and I have lots of things I want to speak to.

Enam Gbewonyo, Venice Nude Me Performance 11 © Michal Murawski

PO: Performance is a relatively new aspect of your practice, what has been the impact of this new addition?

EG: The performance element has been really exciting. My first performance was in September 2018 and there’s been so much growth in a short space of time. If you’d asked me a few years ago about performance I would have said no way, that’s not me. But now, I can’t imagine not performing. I’ve built my confidence as a performance artist and the intricate stories I’m trying to tell in this way. One of the gifts of being an artist is the opportunity to grow yourself as a human being through this artistic practice. I’m really relishing it and grateful for being on a journey that’s brought me to this point of storytelling and finding out that this is also who I am as an Ewe (Ghana) person; we are weavers, we are storytellers so as a textile and performance artist, I am just being my true self.

I always think about my great-great-grandmother, I really have no sense of who she was because there was no documentation. My mother knows a few stories and it only goes back a few generations. She was a woman who knew life before colonisation and any standards of beauty that were in opposition to who she was. How did she walk the earth? It must have been with such confidence and grace and real pride in who she is. My performances are a means of going back and finding that true pride in self. The next step is to figure out how do you protect this when you live in a world that on a daily basis tries to break you down and make you feel lesser?

Enam Gbewonyo, Christies Lates Nude Me Part II performance, © SMD Photography

PO: The way you’ve described wanting to explore your lineage through the women in your family is beautiful and something many can relate to as we all search for some understanding of how we have come to exist. Although we as Africans have a great tradition of oral history, for many young people or those in the diaspora there is often a sense that there is a piece missing from the puzzle or a feeling of encountering barriers, how have you dealt with this?

EG: Performance for me is so freeing and sometimes I go into myself and I’m not necessarily aware of the audience. I’m weaving in this story of my matrilineal lineage and having this very personal internal dialogue with these imagined characters of who these women are. It’s a moment of openness and vulnerability. In each performance, I have these four corners and posts to depict myself, my mother, my grandmother and great-grandmother. At points in my Marrakech performance, I would have these moments with a post which represented one of these women and it was emotional. For the first time, I was thinking deeply about how their existence has enabled me to be here. As much as there may be a missing link or things that we don’t know, we actually do, it’s within us. It’s important for us to go within to find the strength and performance has been a key moment to tap into and try that. It’s a beautiful and vulnerable moment that I feel so much stronger after. As much as it is about telling these stories, it’s about creating space for black women to develop a line of enquiry to find themselves too.

PO: Your work is described as creating live spaces of healing, place of awareness and creating portals for transformation, how important is space in developing your work?

EG: Wherever I am, it is infused in the work. Following the performance in Marrakech I did a residency with Black Shades Projects and I was housed in a beautiful organic farm which spoke to me on many levels as my work also deals with themes of sustainability and how out of alignment we are with the planet and natural energy forces.

I’m often performing in very white institutional spaces and there’s a constant conversation about how I perform in a leotard which is my skin tone and it’s almost like I’m performing naked in the space. There is a part of me that thinks about the depiction of black women’s bodies and how they’ve often been exoticised but for me, my work is often about reclaiming and about confidently taking up space in places. We are as black women the foundation of these empires, without our bodies those empires and buildings wouldn’t exist. We’ve always been told that we’re not wanted or don’t belong. We are born of the earth as any other human being and we should have the right to enter any place we choose. All of this is knitted into the work, how I’m feeling, how the audience is feeling – we are in conversation even if we’re not physically talking.

Enam Gbewonyo, Teetering on the edge of visibility, the invisible disguised as visible IV, 2019

vintage family and erotica photographs on tea-stained recycled paper, used tights and cotton hand stitching on tea-stained canvas, 30 x 30 x 7.5cm

PO: How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your practice? 

EG: I’m feeling quite lucky as I’ve just come back from a residency. I was already in a place of pause and reflection and I’m in the process of developing a really exciting project with the Black Shades Projects. We’ve got plans to do something this summer and develop it further. Having this time at home gives me the opportunity to think much more deeply about the project and in that sense, my residency continues. I can use this time to continue making, exploring research and developing works. It’s strange [laughs] because I’m seeing this as a real positive.

This period has given me a chance to reconnect with people, my brother works and travels a lot, we rarely get time to speak and now I’m having FaceTime calls with him and my other brother – it’s just been such a nice time for connection. The fact that we are in good in health and are able to turn something that is quite traumatic into something positive will hopefully help others during this period.

PO: What one song has been on your mind or speaks to your emotions in the current climate?

EG: It would have to be To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Nina Simone, while I was in Marrakech, I watched the documentary What Happened Miss Simone? (2015) and it has been on my mind since. It was very pertinent to the work I was reflecting on during the residency as I thought about Nina Simone’s journey and all the demons she carried with her and how I explore generational traumas – I want to create spaces for women to explore those traumas. Having just performed and then watching Adelaide [Damoah] perform, experiencing the exhibition Her Eyes, They Never Lie curated by Lisa Anderson, being in a space at AFREEculture and 1:54, surrounded by creative minds made me feel really hopeful. We’ve all been talking about it; we’re currently experiencing a black renaissance. This song is still so relevant today, as much as I’m hopeful, I’m very cognisant of the fact that there is so much work to do as there is still so much inequality which rings true on so many levels at this present moment.