One was Ika HügelMarshall, who was active in the women’s rights movement in Frankfurt and in ADEFRA (Afro-Deutsche Frauen). Meeting Lorde in 1987, the year cancer was found in Lorde’s ovaries, Hügel-Marshall went on to write her autobiography, detailing her experiences of racism in Germany. She would later co-author the documentary film Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992. (3) Other AfroGerman women – writers, activists like May Ayim and Katharina Oguntoye – also published their history, their stories.

In 2020, Damoah revisits a key critical text for her, Lorde’s 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and she seeks to reconnect with joy as Lorde suggests. Pleasure: experienced through the body, whether dancing alone in the studio, or staring at a tray of pure pigment and feasting on its colour. A riot of colours: pinks, yellows, oranges, deep purples, coppers, sparkly whites, ultramarine, and cobalt blues. A departure from her usual palette of black, gold, red, white, and blue. Allowing chance elements to intrude, experimenting freely on different surfaces, including found objects. Building up patterns, layers. Then also uncovering, revealing what is concealed, like the meticulous undressing of a clothed body. In the process of scraping away, vertically, tidily, something new emerges. Sometimes Damoah deliberately or accidentally destroys what was hidden, or she embeds it deeper below the surface, burying it like a secret. The work becomes a palimpsest, holding both the known and the unknown within it. Other times, the original canvas disappears entirely, overlaid by gestures that change it beyond recognition. Only the artist can attest to its former appearance; the viewer is left with a surface that hints at what may lie below. Pigment obscures writing. Damoah’s poems – a collection that, for now, is unread by everyone but its intended recipient, who may or may not exist – remain out of reach. Lines are revealed only in tantalizing fragments. 

 

Until she feels it again: the exhilaration of being alive, “a feeling of stepping out of something very dark into the light.” (4) All the while remembering that these acts of making are what heal her. In retrospect, even the choice of surfaces, however chance driven, feels prescient: handmade paper which was already in Damoah’s studio is made of Khadi rag, renowned for being acid-free, as if the work was always about self-preservation.

 

Of course, the ensuing series ‘Radical Joy’ wasn’t created in a vacuum. It owes much to Damoah’s former research, in particular, her investigations of three key artists who have influenced her practice: David Hammons, Yves Klein, and Ana Mendieta.

 

Hammons’ technique for body prints involved him coating his skin, clothes, and hair in margarine then pressing against paper laid on top of illustration board, usually set on the floor. There was often a stasis in his performance – between rolling on paper and the act of getting up – a few minutes of contemplation where, amongst other things, he thought about the best way to move without smudging the image. He would follow this by sifting powdered pigments over the work and then spraying it with fixative. 

 

Damoah has adapted this method. In place of margarine, she uses Shea oil which is derived from the kernels of the seed of the vitellaria paradoxa, the shea tree which grows in East and West tropical Africa. Not only is this a meaningful material in terms of referencing her Ghanaian heritage; it, too, speaks to self-preservation, self-care. Rich in nutrients, it soothes and repairs skin, nourishing it with vitamins and antioxidants. 

 

Yves Klein’s ‘Anthropometries’ from the early 1960s made use of nude female models as ‘living paintbrushes,’ their breasts and thighs rolled in his vibrant, patented blue and pressed against surfaces. Before that, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil collaborated on the ‘Blueprints’ series (1949-51)(5) : delicate cyanotypes, created with Weil’s technique of shining ultraviolet light on a nude body posed on a big roll of architectural blueprint paper. As the negative shadow of the body’s outline developed, it was washed blue. 

 

Damoah eschews these cool tones for a richer, warmer palette though there is a parallel, perhaps, between Klein’s aim to replicate costly lapis lazuli and her using at least one precious pigment (her hot pink is six times the cost of an ordinary pink). Like Weil and Rauschenberg and Ana Mendieta, it is her own body that she deploys. Except there’s an unfair expectation that black artists have a responsibility to reference the weight of both their history and their present. Hammons’ and Mendieta’s practices were overtly political, reflecting their marginalized positions. Damoah’s is rooted in the Ghanaian concept of ‘Sankofa,’ which believes it is important to understand the past in order not to repeat the same mistakes in the future and the present, and she has consistently engaged with what she describes as “the continual consequences of the epistemic violence of colonialism and intersectional feminism.” (6)

 

In addition to those expectations, despite its prevalence, there is a historical bias against the woman artist using her body in a way that does not conform. If she is deemed too conventionally attractive (Schneemann, Wilke), her work may be commercially viable, but she is chastised for being vain or pandering to the ‘male gaze’; if her body is considered to lie outside those parameters, she is ‘othered.’

 

In the context of early mainstream feminist practice, using sexual imagery was declared even riskier. Feminists’ troubled conflation of the erotic and the pornographic led to the marginalization of artists like American painter Joan Semmel. In the early 1970s, she explored the erotic from a female perspective painting high-key colour nude couples having sex, only to find they were ill-received by some women’s groups in the art world. She recalls, “[That] doing sexual art made me not politically correct seemed absurd. I ignored it. But I paid a price, in terms of being left out of certain shows.” (7)

 

If making such work was already difficult for a white woman (and Semmel’s was less controversial than that of peers Cosey Fanni Tutti or Betty Tomkins), how much harder would it have been for a black artist to explore desire? At the 2016 exhibition Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics at Dallas Contemporary, for instance, which showcased Semmel amongst others, black artists were not represented. Just earlier this year, queer black photographer Ajamu X claimed, “I think we live in a country [UK] that has a fear of the erotic, a fear of pleasure.” (8)

 

These twin concerns – the sense of responsibility Damoah felt as a black artist to engage with weighty subjects and as a woman artist to be wary of eroticism as subject matter – led to her shying away from exploring that part of herself in her practice. However, as a consequence of the pandemic, during which she lived alone and was forced to spend time by herself, with herself, she was spurred into reevaluating that self.

 

And in following Nietzsche’s call to allow contradiction (“How else can we adapt and survive? How else can we accept new ideas?” Nietzsche asks), she found herself back with Lorde who argues in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” that the erotic is about the deeply felt, that it can be a bridge that connects the spiritual to the political and is not something that should be confined to the realm of sex alone. “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of its depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” (9)

 

For Damoah, this also meant accepting that, notwithstanding a sense of catharsis or empowerment that comes from educating oneself, of plugging gaps left by the (British) education system’s treatment of history, there’s an emotional and psychological cost to researching and enacting traumatic histories, of literally embodying that grief and pain, which is too often overlooked. (What was the psychic cost to Ana Mendieta of making her visceral performances that spoke to male violence, of smearing herself in blood and burning her silhouette?)