Following a four-month residency with Gallery 1957 in Accra, Larry Amponsah’s solo exhibition ‘Mastery might be a long way off, but the flow state induced by floristry is profoundly rewarding,’ has received a healthy wealth of praise. It’s seen the Ghanaian artist team up with independent curator Katherine Finerty and the pair have joined forces again for the current group show at Gallery 1957 in London, ‘Constellations – Part 1: Figures on Earth & Beyond’. But this isn’t their first rodeo. Since meeting at the 2018 Royal College of Art MA show (where Amponsah studied painting before becoming known for his multimedia collage works), they have hammered out “diverse local experiences and expressions across the globe that transcend boundaries,” says Finerty. It’s a plus that the artist-curator duo share a love of market strolls, from Makola to Portobello Road, leading to substantial exhibitions such as 'When a Stone Cracks, We Don't Stitch' (2019) at 50 Golborne Road gallery well before these recent collaborations.

For the Accra show, Amponsah calibrated the gallery space into a place for contemplation; a gathering-in for self-discovery. Influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), the artist invites us to contest inhabited architecture against inorganic geometric narratives. Correspondingly, tapping into the deep inspirations from the artist’s work, Finerty says she was interested in exploring how the collage paintings and sculptural elements embodying a “kaleidoscopic sense of diligence and freedom” can make way for “imagining spaces for boundary-breaking critical exchange and inclusive, immersive participation”. For both the artist and the curator, care is key in creating art experiences for progress of critical discourse.

After Amponsah left Ghana in 2015 to study, first in China and then the UK, he developed his rigorous methodology, although his research was impeded by forms of racial profiling. He nonetheless persisted to alchemize the white on Black differences into colour to engage the complications of deracination. Notably, Amponsah’s work has become a form of socio-analytical inquiry into the political agency of space. With the power of fiction, he says he yearns to “elevate the spirit of people in order for them to bring out the best in themselves”. In retreat from formulaic painting mores, there’s this performative sense where archived existence is permitted penetration via intrusive symbolism of restructured bodies imbued with multi-cultural possibilities. You can explore the appeal of a safe green haven, as well as probe into the accommodating lust of luxury and its intimacy beyond societal dystopia.

Between naiveté and knowingness, entireness and fragmentation, Amponsah’s approach to collage tends to take on “the kind of challenge contemporary art gives, which is the whole world in itself,” he says. The self-acclaimed cultural sampler does not only pick from people's family albums, antique Ghanaian calendars, movies, music, magazines, literature and conversations, but also poetically appends a vintage family mirror for one of his sculptural human figures to lean into. In doing so, he’s delving into the way images influence our thinking and vice versa. The artist believes that by looking at the craftsmanship of imagery, we are in turn looking at the crafting of our own identities, since both aspects need “incredible amounts of calculations, precision, care, attention, investment, and the welcoming of sacrifices”.

Moreover, by exploring the nearly immutable imaginaries through horticultural architecture, the artist releases us to diverse cuts of familiar and thought-up built environments, to allow our mental palette to fill in the gaps. The artist’s dependence on visual poetry with embedded parentheses of botany, allows for radical ways of reading new languages that move the pivot from artistry as production house to insistence on carving schools of thoughts.

To engage enthusiasts in the grander global dialogue where there is a constant mobility of information, objects, experiences, people and ideologies; the artist pursues a technical mastery. “If the images of the present do not change, one must change the images of the past,” he asserts. Inspired by Virgil Abloh’s 3% rule in the age of proliferation of images, Amponsah believes that the archive points us to reactivate history. While popular magazines promote consumerism to the unidirectional benefit of a geographical and socio-economic occasion, his oeuvre allows for transplanting and cross-pollination for new fruits and experiments to prevail.

Naturally, his methods are ever-evolving. “I used to make physical hands-on collage by printing images, tearing them up and then rejoining them, prior to using paint as an object of necessity. Due to constraints during the Covid period, I was making miniature collages, which with time have become the sketches that have radicalised my works.” To not close any gap as a practitioner, the artist sees more than one absolute way of entry into the practice, as “experimentation avails the keys to go through different doors in order to be able to get into the main”.

Aside from meeting an alluring sculptural family, the Gallery 1957 Accra audience could also examine original collage studies giving away traces of technical secrets. In plain sight, viewers were carried away enjoyably perusing books and magazines from the exhibition’s research library specialising in architecture, identity politics, and fashion. In fact, one visiting Aunty was comfortable enough to take a public cat nap in the gallery space. Another sign that Amponsah is doing the universe’s work by waking us up to the truth that “as with all homes, portals abound, propelling us from the past into the future and back, in a forever flow state”.

This brings us to ‘Constellations, Part 1: Figures On Earth & Beyond’ where Finerty curates alongside ground-breaking artist-curators Nuna Adisenu-Doe and Tracy Naa Thompson. The show focusses on the line between natural and artificial worlds through collective-making and world-building by UK and West African artists. Looking forward, ‘Constellations Part 2’ will be held in Accra later this year. From origin stories to science fiction, the curators look to use Part 1 as the commencement stage for a far-reaching dialogue “from roots in the earth to stars from the cosmos” to explore the integrated human–nature-object macrosystems for the renewal of ecosystems and narratives.

The beauty of art is that there is room for everyone. Beyond static identity, Amponsah believes that art is about “who you can possibly become; a tool to shape, a weapon to destroy, and an instrument to entertain, to allow people into the conversation.” Within the expression of suppression and injustices, how do we uplift ourselves? How do we console ourselves? How do we reward ourselves? It almost seems as if Amponsah was present at the table where W. H. Auden coined the word ‘topophilia’. He beckons to us that new worlds can be made by reassembling and bringing into focus the dream, in a place and at a time undefined, emotional, personal and unexplainable.

Constellations, Part 1: Figures On Earth & Beyond is on view at Gallery 1958, London, until 25 May 2024