Erica Nuamah is a 21 year old artist who is currently based in London and has recently completed their studies at the Ruskin School of Art in 2020. Nuamah’s works are relics of trauma often created to process, reflect, or resolve. Within their practice Nuamah is very conscious of entitlement and accessibility, which heavily influence the materials, display, titling, and composition of the works created. However, this is just the context for why they create not necessarily the context of the works, once shown Nuamah relinquishes their rights to the narrative, and any narrative manifested by a viewer becomes relevant.

Where have you been doing during lockdown?

So working from home has been interesting, my mum has been nice enough to give me a little corner of the living room, which naturally turns into the entire living room. My sisters and my mum have been very generous with the space and they have been very okay with me claiming the space. It’s been nice working from home; a lot of the work I create is very intimate, it’s me confronting myself, or confronting the way I feel about others, or the way I feel about something, being able to do it at home in a space where I feel safe is a big part of that.

How does your work respond to the current political climate?

It is hard for me to pinpoint a time when I was really thinking about the re-imagining of history, I feel like it’s everywhere now-a-days, particularly on social media where people will re-imagine Disney princesses in a different genre or as a different race. There are also TV shows like Noughts & Crosses, BBC, that are re-imagining societies. One thing I can say is that when I first started researching the work of Carrie Mae Weems, who is actually a very big influence on my practice as well, and I saw her photograph Mayflowers from May Days Long Forgotten, where she basically takes the flower girl from Manet’s Olympia and just brings her out of that frame and brings her to the forefront. Just doing that alone, playing with that history, and giving it something else; I think that was my first little - “oh, that’s kind of cool” - I feel that was my first moment. Since then I have always had this interest in what’s happening right now and my immediate response to the momentum that has happened with the Black Lives Matter movement, certain things felt very necessary.

Where do you see your work going?

In regards to the future, I want to continue with my practice and hopefully continue practicing as an artist, but one thing I really want to do is get my technical knowledge up. I feel that once I know these basic or even advanced things about different paint, different materials, and different ways to utilise them, I feel that can do a lot for the way I work. Career-wise I was lucky enough to have an internship last year in a contemporary arts gallery which made me realise how much I really do like the gallery environment and I would really love to work in a gallery.