Tanoa Sasraku at PEER – Artforum Worldwide
Every of us is “an archaeological web site,” Lucy Sante argued in her 1998 memoir, The Manufacturing facility of Information. “What passes for roots is definitely a matter of sediment, of accretion, of probability and juxtaposition.” This notion of the self as strata got here to thoughts whereas visiting Tanoa Sasraku’s exhibition “Liths,” whereby the British-Ghanaian artist makes use of geological imagery to look at her private ties to the UK’s panorama.
5 monumental freestanding circumstances show what at first look seem like stone blocks (all works Lith, 2022). Two are organized as a trench to stroll by way of; the others tower over viewers just like the Bronze Age monuments after which they’re named. Whereas they’re exhibited on their very own, the “Liths” are greatest understood in relation to a smaller collection referred to as “Terratypes,” 2022. Course of carries which means in Sasraku’s work. The “Terratypes” have been made in and from the panorama. The artist foraged pigments from personally important locations throughout the British Isles and rubbed them onto stacks of clean newsprint that she had collated, stitched collectively, and embossed with gridlike patterns. She then soaked the paper in bays, bogs, or rivers or made strategic lacerations within the completed floor. Every Lith derives from the torn leftovers of this course of. Sasraku digitally scanned and enlarged chosen fragments after which printed them on Japanese paper, in order that the ultimate photographs tackle the size and visible texture of a slab of stone.
In comparison with the “Terratypes,” the “Liths” are cooler, extra withholding. Sasraku thinks of them as portraits. If the “Terratypes” enact an excavation, revealing the type of sedimentation Sante alluded to, the “Liths” are all floor, scanned, skin-deep fragments standing in for a layered entire.
