Between Continents, Emma Prempeh Is Making a Home

In the early phase of the pandemic, artist Emma Prempeh was regularly walking for two hours at a stretch, from her mother’s house in the Crystal Palace neighborhood of southeast London to her studio in Camberwell. The artist, who had graduated from Goldsmiths University in 2019, had been given a workspace as part of an award. But with the dangers of COVID, she didn’t feel comfortable taking public transport. So she would walk for an hour and a half to reach her studio, sometimes staying there for days at a time, rolling out a futon and finishing off a bottle of alcohol while she worked on her paintings. 

The paintings she made at that time would constitute a solo show, “Faces of Love,” that was mounted in late 2020 at V.O Curations in London. It was a powerful but somewhat claustrophobic time for her; she was also processing the end of a relationship. “It was very challenging,” she tells me, “because you’re sleeping in the same space as your work, and just staring at it.”

When we speak in early May, the young artist is in a more open and expansive mood. She’s about to make her first trip to New York—her first trip to the United States—where she will exhibit new work at the Tiwani Contemporary gallery booth during Frieze New York. This new work was made in London and Kampala, where her boyfriend lives and where she’s found, she tells me, a small but thriving artistic community. 

The new work is about a more comfortable home than a futon on the floor of a studio. It’s about making a home in well-worn, lived-in spaces (an armchair with a doily on its arms), or boisterous, energetic ones (a kitchen packed with overlapping bodies). It’s about the things—living and inert—that make a home. In one painting, Prempeh foregrounds a bottle of Waragi gin, an Ugandan liquor and something that she associates with her boyfriend. 

Prempeh has given a lot of thought over the years to the idea of what makes a home, not just because the traditional trajectory—go to university, leave home—didn’t unfold for her. Since she attended college in London, she stayed at home (and continued to do so when she was getting her master’s at the Royal College of Art), where she had grown up with two older sisters and a Vincentian mother who was a nurse. (Her grandmother emigrated to the United Kingdom as part of the Windrush generation.) Part of this was COVID, of course, but part of it was just logistics, and it has given her a deeper understanding of how the people with whom you surround yourself—and how they craft their surroundings—affect your worldview. “I always pick up things that my grandma has in her home because it’s just so fascinating to me—the lace I use, the textures, the patterns, even the colors.”  

Prempeh’s practice is also colored by a heart condition that has perhaps given her a more acute appreciation of mortality than most 26-year-olds. She discovered at 19 that she had a rare syndrome called Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW), characterized by an extremely elevated heartbeat caused by an extra pathway between the heart’s upper and lower chambers. She has had two surgeries since her diagnosis, but still experiences the flutters and palpitations for somewhat mysterious reasons. 

“It is a big thing with how I am in my practice because it made me kind of recognize the idea of death,” Prempeh says. “I think it makes me have this existential view, like I’m trying to understand why I’m here. I like to look at people because they are the people that bring me joy.”

Though she often paints with a somber palette, there is unmistakable exuberance in her paintings: the light glinting off a glass reflected in the smile of a dinner guest; a blouse with a floral pattern that has brought the outside world in. As for what mode her new work will occupy, she is reluctant to say too much, preferring that people just go and see it—“’cause sometimes the surprise of seeing something is quite interesting.” Though she considers herself primarily a painter, this work will involve some sound and light projections as well. “I like to use other methods of thinking about myself and our intangible existence.” 

Emme Prempeh at Frieze New York is on from May 17 through May 21 at The Shed in New York City.

Artist portraits are by photographer Ellyse Anderson, who is working on a series about female artists.