Tanoa Sasraku: Man Engine

4 Oct-4 Nov 2023

PV 3 Oct 2023, 6-8pm

Tanoa Sasraku

Overview

This presentation features a new series of Tanoa Sasraku’s Terratypes, a body of work which draws on the artist’s personal and historical connection to the British landscape.

Sasraku’s Terratypes are unique, sculptural hybrids of painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, and textiles. To create these works, the artist forages for million-year old earth pigments in locations like Dartmoor, the Jurassic Coast, the Scottish Highlands, and Ghana, hand-rubbing them into sheets of blank newsprint, which are then sewn, soaked and ripped, revealing past layers of pigment and pattern; the intersection of geological time and personal memory. 

Through this new body of work, Sasraku expands her exploration of geology, memory and topography to include minerals foraged in spring 2023 from coastal Ghana, the homeland of her late father who worked there as a couturier. Informed by her experience of his death when she was a teenager growing up in the West Country, the artist here fuses together red iron earth pigments, foraged from mining regions of both Ghana and Cornwall, whilst using garment patterns to re-imagine her father’s body via the tools of his trade. The results are mysterious, ceremonial-like objects weathered with centuries of materiality, presenting a new way of engaging the landscape.

Artists