Based between Los Angeles and Accra, multidisciplinary artist Kenturah Davis’ work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, textiles, sculpture and performances. Davis earned her MFA in painting from Yale and has exhibited her work across Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. The artist tells: “I came to Palm Heights with a curiosity about the library. My time here is short, so it’s really about perusing the variety of texts that have accumulated here and letting them inform the next body of work. I’ve assembled a few stacks of books so that the titles create a poetic phrase. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a weaving process, whereby I write phrases out on paper with different colour pens, then process them into thread and weave them into a cloth. The word ‘text’ comes from a Latin word for ‘woven’, so these works are quite literally an embodiment of a ‘textile’. So some of my findings in these archives could make their way there.”
Kenturah Davis
