Sven Christian [SC]: You’re making two sculptures for your upcoming exhibition in the Covered Space. What are they made of?

Joseph Awuah-Darko [JAD]: They’re made from plastic cable-ties and pot scourers around a steel meshwork that’s been welded into shape.

SC: Why those materials?

JAD: I’ve become intrigued with the juxtaposition of hard and soft, which is a recurring motif in my practice. These two sculptures are an AfroFuturistic nod to the palanquin, like the one that my father is being carried in, in the photograph that I showed you. I wanted to use this very industrial material and transform it into something that looks much softer, like a pillow. I like the idea of creating that contrast. The antithesis interests me.

SC: What is a palanquin?

JAD: Throughout history royalty have been carried in them. My reference is specific to the Ashanti context that I’ve been exposed to from a young age. There’s a ritualistic ceremony that happens on the first Saturday of every month, where the chief is carried in a procession throughout town. I have a picture of my dad being carried around in a crowd. I reference it because the poetry of my practice largely revolves around rituals. In this case, there’s the mundane ubiquity of sleep, where one is vulnerable, juxtaposed with a chief being carried around.

SC: It’s not like you’re trying to represent that, though. You’re treatment sits at this interplay between hard and soft. Someone looking at the work isn’t going to recognise that reference unless they’re told about it. It feels more about the mood?

JAD: Yes, the sentiment. It’s not an actual translation.

SC: Which is why you talk about the poetry of your work?

JAD: Exactly. It’s not meant to be literal.

SC: Having spent so much time in the Project Space recently with Walter Oltmann’s show, In Time (2023), I can’t help but think about how the softness generated in your two sculptures has evolved through repetition; the cable-ties begin to look soft when accumulated en masse, to read like caterpillar hair or. . . .

JAD: I’ve always been obsessed with materiality, so it was very helpful when you sent me Walter’s PhD. The work I made for the Stanley Museum was comprised of raffia and plastic. Permeating my practice is this perennial obsession with weaving and materiality. I get excited about not knowing how the juxtaposition of certain materials will turn out. The work I’m making now, from a certain angle, looks like foam; the way foam builds up during a bubble bath. Again, there’s this play on hard and soft. It’s a bit like life in many ways.

SC: Let’s talk about the place of bondage in your work. With the cable-ties it’s quite literal. Scourers also point to things that stick. But on a conceptual level, one could extend that to think about familial bonds and so on. . .

JAD: Last night I was tightening those cable-ties, over and over. The poetry of that mechanism is that once you squeeze it, you can’t undo it. There’s a permanency to it. That was quite cathartic. In a way it ties to another motif in my practice: this exploration of identity and how we are bound by certain social structures or our perception of ourselves. By words. By thoughts and other isms.

SC: One could also be bed bound. . .

JAD: Yes. One is a health obligation and one is ceremonial. That’s a wider discussion, but when working last night it did cross my mind that what I was doing had this permanence; that once on the ties won’t come off. The plastic might not be the most lush material either, but within the context of this ethereal looking thing, that sense of permanence, strength, and confinement is quite interesting. If you look carefully at the meshwork, you’ll notice that I was mimicking a pillow.

SC: To me they look like those shark purses one finds washed up on the beach. There’s a protective element to them. But the cable-tie also came up in Stefanie Koemeda’s work, during her residency.3 You’ll remember it from the exhibition. It’s an object that she and Io Makandal spoke about a lot in residence. I don’t know if it’s a material that you’ve worked with before, but speaking of bondage, it’s interesting to think about how things get absorbed and lodge themselves in the psyche, in the same way that I can’t help thinking about the rub between Oltmann’s works, with their cocoon or husk-like forms, and the sculptures that you’re making now. The things that we surround ourselves with, or that surround us, tend to leak into what we do. Of course, the treatment is always very different.

JAD: I’ve had this concept in gestation for a long time, but I wasn’t entirely sure which materials would give me the desired effect. The end result is lovely, but I’m interested in what one’s process tells you about the work. I tend to covet a certain kind of tenderness or intimacy within the context of modernity. I didn’t have a lot of it in my personal life, so I try to create these utopias for myself. This is true of my choice in colour too — the pastels — or my use of Kente. I grew up wearing it, so there’s a tactile connection or intimacy that I have with that textile.

SC: You mention an interest in process. Watching those two sculptures emerge, it’s funny how brutal the process actually is. John [Nkhoma] was in the workshop welding, bending metal. . .

JAD: Yes, it requires this violent manipulation of matter. That’s part of the poetry, for me. One of my favourite quotes is: ‘You don’t know how tough I’ve had to be to be this soft.’ That applies to my life in a very personal way. My interactions with people come from a place of knowing how bad and how tough things can get. As someone who is manic depressive, who survived cancer, who still has a very complicated relationship with their parents, who had to be independent at nineteen, who had to build an institution. . . I think it takes having been meek and inexperienced and vulnerable, and having gone through things that harden you, to then appreciate the value of being soft. All of these very tough, measured, restrictive processes which bend the material to one’s will — what emerges is this capacity to value softness and vulnerability, because you’re aware of the darker elements. It’s like a velvet grip. You understand the importance and balance of both.

SC: This could be a good time to talk about the title of your show, Soft Landing. How do you picture those two words co-existing?

JAD: At first it sounds like an oxymoron, ‘soft’ and ‘landing.’ Landing seems quite firm and turgid. Soft is the opposite. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. The second is some kind of descent, be it as an analogy for life or metaphorically. It’s almost like giving oneself grace when you hit a low point.

SC: Like a safety net?

JAD: Exactly. When I have depressive episodes, every two-and-a-half weeks or so, all I want is to stay in bed. Tracey Emin did a number on that, but as far as the pragmatism of life goes, there’s a sense that you need to get up and get going. I’m often drawn to nostalgic material, like the duvet or lace that covered my grandmother’s sidetable, my use of pastel colours, or the reference in the third sculptural work, to be installed in the residency workshop, to the windmills that one makes from soft paper as a child. For me it says something about lost innocence. When you become an adult, you realise there is no safety net. It’s like that satirical song by Paramore: ‘Ain’t it fun living in the real world. Ain’t it fun being all alone?’5 As an adult you are expected to be this determinant in society, a contributing member who has to account for oneself — that can be overwhelming. It’s something that we all navigate. Was it you who made the Teletubby reference the other day?

SC: Yes. That’s been an ongoing thing for me. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing my PhD on soft play; these supposedly safe spaces — like in Spur or McDonalds — that originate out of white paranoia towards the end the Civil Rights Movement; there was this investment in getting one’s kids off the streets. That’s a drastic simplification, but I’ve been making an inventory of drawings based on the infrastructure or architecture of the show, and these windmills play a big part. When I saw the steel sample that John made for you I was reminded of this. What struck me is that in the show they’re like these portals; they announce that something’s about to happen on the TVs in their stomachs, so there’s this anticipatory logic. Your work made me think about how, when kids play with those paper windmills, there’s this sense of transformation. There’s a kind of magic to it. But it’s not unlike what you were saying about the bed as a place of dreaming.

JAD: Yes, a transformation also happens. When I reference lost innocence, that’s a part of what I’m trying to bring across. Even though the duvet I’m holding in these images is soft, that’s not how I would pose as a child. Things change with adulthood. Blowing a paper windmill is transformative in the same way as one’s coming of age, which is irreversible.

SC: In your textile and sculptural works, you bounce between figurative and abstractive processes. How do you see those two co-existing?

JAD: As a curator, a collector, an artist, a person, I’ve always understood, academically, the delineation between figuration and abstraction, but I’ve never made that distinction. I know it exists. I get it. But I accept that I’m still at a fairly early point in my career, so I’ve given myself permission to dance between the two. I’m also looking to work with words for the first time.

SC: I only say figurative because you’re dealing with something identifiably human, but they do still read as abstractions — again, you’re not trying to be representative; you use the human form more like a motif or hieroglyph. It’s interesting to think about words along a similar line. What sort of words are you thinking of working with?

JAD: Most will be these aphorisms or quotes which, in a very autobiographical way, have gotten me out of very tough situations, mentally.

SC: So these words are also soft landings, in a way; things you can fall back on?

JAD: I’ve never thought about it that way, but yes. I was inspired — visually, aesthetically — by Willem Boshoff’s works here at NIROX; how he juxtaposes letters from different languages. Part of my research here was to understand how artists use words meaningfully. The importance of this residency, to me, is that sometimes things hide in plain sight. My occasional stutter aside, I’ve always had a profound love for words. I’ve found a lot of reprieve and safety in them. Given my painfully obvious relationship with words when things get hard, I find it strange that I’ve carried this self-prejudice about what contemporary art from Africa is meant to look like. I’ve never thought to incorporate words in my work until now, which is strange. The first thing I attacked when I got here were the books, because that’s how my brain works. I’m left-handed, so cerebrally I’m much more visual. I’ll never be an actuary like my dad.

SC: The work that you’re referring to, Boshoff’s Children of the Stars (2009), also has this interplay between hard and soft. It’s made from Belfast Black Granite that has been polished and made to look liquid. That’s a very particular kind of rock, found only in Belfast, that was created following the meteor impact that created the Vredefort dome. Again there’s this transformation of matter, from solid to liquid and back to this composite material that is then made to look liquid. When it rains or gets wet, the words partly disappear, resurfacing as it dries. It makes me think about some of the cinematic references that came up for me when you first mentioned the title Soft Landing, like that scene from American Beauty (1999), when Mena Suvari disappears into a bed of roses, or the darker variant from Get Out (2017), when Daniel Kaluuya disappears into this void and is locked in this indefinite freefall. There’s a sense of horror that comes with that, as with American Beauty.

JAD: That endlessness is very discomforting, even when dressed in red lipstick. But Instagram has been a very useful tool, as an indicator of things I might want to focus on more. I don’t look to Instagram for validation — I don’t take it too seriously — but it’s a great think-tank or focus group. I don’t think I have anything special to say, which might be a weird version of self-deprecation, but the fact that these things seem to have such a ripple effect on people means that I’ve somehow naturalised my enjoyment of playing with words. It’s always felt like second nature, from the time I was a sassy-mouthed teenager until now.

SC: Where is the place of vulnerability for you on those platforms? You’re putting yourself out there when you tell your personal story, but is there something restorative for you in that process? Does it make you feel safe?

JAD: You’re asking is what it means for me to share and be open with a bunch of complete strangers?

SC: Yes, because to me it feels at odds with that idea of a safety net.

JAD: I agree. I think because of my age and where I’m from (despite being born in London), there is an approachable quality to how I communicate what I’m going through. I’ve had this bid to manufacture that safety for people who don’t have it, because I know what that feels like. If you go to my page, what may look like a very picturesque, arguably idyllic existence is marred with so much shit. So much nuance and pain.