Cecilia Lamptey-Botchway: Make We Dance

Cecilia Lamptey-Botchway’s show Make We Dance explores the idea of dance as a form of movement. In the show, various figures strike poses, swirling and dancing. The elements in these paintings bring together the artist’s different artistic strands.

Trained at the Yaba College of Technology School of Art, Design and Printing in Lagos, Nigeria, the flowery background gestures towards the abstraction of Lamptey­ Botchway’s textile practice. The cloth stamping and batik tradition motifs have previously appeared in the backgrounds of her earlier body of work. They were layered on the canvas as they would be on a fabric. Currently, they are freed from the constraints of the textile layout.

The motifs interact with the figures. In the best parts, the motifs float behind and in front of the figures, complicating the background-foreground dichotomy. The figures themselves are adorned with mopping wool. Taking an anthropological onsite nonparticipant approach, Lamptey-Botchway observed her subjects in markets, churches, and dance classes, studying their movements and rendering them on canvases.

When the artist started using mopping wool, it was because she made a connection among the cleaning object, domesticity, and female-based chores. The wool appears in already made strands which are then carefully glued in the sketch spaces left unoccupied by the application of acrylic and oil.

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