‘There’s Gold on the Palms of My Hands’, Tiffanie Delune’s freshest body of work made in Accra during a three-month residency at Gallery 1957, is for all the passionate dreamers out there. The exhibition of multimedia paintings acts as a soul map to spiritual dreamscapes filled with yellowing eyes of ocean currents, orange dusk-seeking contortions of light and deep blue spaces layered with atmospheric swirls. The Paris-born, Lisbon-based artist shows herself to be a fully bloomed colour architect building ambitious and surreal worlds, in part inspired by her Ghanaian surroundings, that make the observer contemplate the importance of play.

Delune was a creative child, something her father neither stopped her from practising nor actively encouraged: “Probably because he didn’t have the means for art school but also did not see it as a path where financial stability is easy,” she reflects. She went on to work in the advertising industry for almost 10 years before taking the self-taught path to becoming a visual storyteller. She started off by tapping into her Congolese, French and Belgian roots as a tool to time travel back to her childhood and explore her complex identity. She summoned up the inner spirits to portray dreamy flowers and birds dropping off hope with circumambient colour splurges that teleport you into spell-working fantasies.

Older works are embedded with cardboard, hairnet, fabric and more, embracing biomorphic sensual forms. Her latest works are a layered vocabulary of acrylic, oil pastel, thread, paper and glitter on rectangular or round canvases and linen. A fast-rising star, Delune has exhibited in London, Paris, Lagos and Los Angeles and her work is in the collections of Fondation Gandur pour l'Art in Geneva, Switzerland and the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, among others.

‘There’s Gold on the Palms of My Hands’ exposes an unbending voice establishing relevance in the meaningless, detail in the neglected outskirts of community. A young Maya Angelou bringing you to her self-curated centre at the fringes. “Practice basically gives you knowledge,” she says. “I thought of some ideas before coming, and also let things happen. I came to my own shapes. If you nourish your mind with images, whether real or photographed, even when you are dreaming or when you’re sleeping... The more you work, the more you get these flashes. I am happy because I am very passionate about what I do and I am having a lot of fun, which is important.”

When I enter the gallery, I find an aureate cavity, kaleidoscopic windows to an inner world of stories. From across the space, the brilliantly overlapping colours draws me in, and as I unwrap the rhythm of layers and symphonies between straights and curves, the seriousness of a planet that knows striking social changes hits me. ‘Have You Gone to the Desert Where There is No One Except Your Shadow?’ is the first piece I encounter. It’s a visual feast of enlightenment as she sawbones her journey; unearthing the positive or negative, under a philosophical microscope. She weaves spirituality into the natural world and posits femininity. We see a sprawling pregnant woman evoking a spirit from the lingering past and the birth of her son. Another piece, The Messenger, is solely dedicated to him. “Embracing the spirit of art, his birth acted as a sort of mirror for me to stop lying to myself and just do it,” she reveals.

In the work, ‘Shed My Ego, Feel My Spirit’, a bird cage crowns the quadrilateral canvas, amidst an explosion of bright colour labyrinths of paper cuts and spray paint. The artist’s multi-engaging experiments through painting, sewing and mixed media create cosmic, anatomical and symbological backgrounds for the distribution of meaningful colours and geometric forms where there is no disregard for the delight and the essence of playfulness.

The use of thread aids a performative asseveration of balance and strong vivacity. Paper cutting finds her dreaming in shapes; how life has sometimes knocked at her door in habitual forms but also in unexpected manners. Many cut outs fall on the floor, and some are picked up, re-used. Just like things life throws at her, sometimes unforeseen, become worthy ingredients for growth. Furthermore, a reminder of how many African artists create by repurposing and how these pieces are sometimes metaphors for facets of lived experiences that they are not afraid to lay bare. “I use the materials with intention, not force them. It has to make meaning and connect to memory and capability as well,” she says. “With abstraction, you really need to be in touch with yourself and listen to that thing inside – whether it’s your belly or your heart. Whether it’s too much or it’s not finished, you’ll feel it.”

In her piece ‘Your Gravity Will Never Be Defined By Your Ruler’, Delune questions the construct of the African map. The limitations of artificial borders are deep incisions through ancient cultures. A reference to an owl is seen deepening the mystery in the design. The central piece ‘The Fall is Never Too High to Blossom’ is a large-scale work depicting Spring, Summer and Fall as a jazzy landscape. And the final piece the artist accomplished during the residency, ‘Ghosts Whisper Fairytales, If You Listen’, also her personal favourite, is a night realm collage with non-realistic forms of Ghana plantain; and on the lower half, white paper cuts of deformed bats submerged in underwater currents.

Delune’s use of textiles in these works is another significant nod to Ghana, this time its history of textiles. The fabrics were purchased at Accra Art Centre, and smeared with shades of orange, purple and blue in tribute to the local tie and dye spirit. In one of these pieces, between a number of evaporating black stars and a cleaved black hand, one can spot the ‘Dreamer’s Ladder’ (also the title). “I already started this style [textiles] during Covid and wanted to keep going here. What I love about the process of making these works is that you can’t mess them up so you have to be really slow and confident. I try to keep the lightness and the transparency of it.”

Together, the works digest the seen and unseen, enlivening emotions of belonging, examining her temporal state of withholdings about home and bringing to the fore her relationship with familiar nature while surrendering to the unknown. She conjures abstraction which the mind interprets as familiar and the heart considers as a not so far-fetched opportunity to draw you in to dream between skies that shine on anatomic limits and inky unknown paths that allow infinite forms of freedom.

Birds in Delune’s work signify flight, freedom, migration, community and independence- the exact values the artist lives for. Ghana has been a fertile nest for her intuitive furtherance, and as she flies back to Portugal, Delune looks to the promising skies burgeoning with pride. ‘There is Gold on the Palms of My Hands’ indeed speaks of remembrance without figuration, of memory making without exact repetition, of living without filters but leaving space for fiction’s freedoms, of growth that does not bury the child inside, of giving birth to a self at home with the now but not leaving the past to idle-sleep.

Tiffanie Delune, There’s Gold on The Palms of my Hands, is on view at Gallery 1957, Accra, until 3 May, 2023.