'Liverpool Counterpoint 16'

During his three day sketching trip in Liverpool in the summer of 2014 Kwami focused his visual research on early 20th century strip-woven kente cloths from southeast Ghana and 19th century brass weights and utensils for storing and measuring gold dust currency from the Asante region. Both these interests are represented in this print. Kwami was also particularly interested in items that had been given to the museum by West Africans, like the brass gold weight of a standing male figure represented in the lower right corner of the print, which was donated to World Museum in 1910 by the Fante barrister John Mensah Sarbah (26.4.10.47). The grids that dominate the upper three quarters of this work seem to constitute a fusion of forms, drawn both from Ghanaian strip-woven textiles and from Modrian's cityscape-inspired paintings remembered from his visit to Tate Liverpool's Mondrian and His Studio exhibition during the Summer of 2014. Kwami sees such fusions to be analogous to the gathering of knowledge and the interweaving of memory involved in the everyday arts of living and communicating.