I describe my practice as visual storytelling; I always try to capture an individual’s story and sense of their experiences through my paintings. In doing so I hope to create an open and accessible platform for personal exploration and discussion. 

I have just started working on a series of paintings called “I have more souls than one”, named after Fernando Pessoa’s collection of poems. 

The work focuses on Transcultural and Diasporic experiences in the UK and explores how these experiences are navigated within the different generations of family. 

This project stemmed from my journey to Ghana with my cousin at the start of 2022. This trip brought into focus many questions about our sense of identity and belonging as members of the Diaspora in the UK.

Unlike our parents and those before, we did not grow up in Ghana and do not fully understand the language. This has led to a slight sense of disconnection from our heritage. 

This is something I wanted to discuss and explore with other people in the UK who have come from similar backgrounds.

This is a project that would be a perfect fit for the theme ‘A Sense of Place’ and the award would provide the ideal platform to fully realise this project within a local community. 

I would look to reach out to people interested in the project and have conversations about the significance of language, environments and heritage in regards to personal senses of identity and belonging.

The significance of language and environment are particular points of interest for me and within this series of work. This is largely due to Stuart Halls research into language’s impact on the formation of cultural identity and our ability/inability to connect to our heritage. I would look to discuss with my potential sitters through a series of recorded conversations which would go on to influence each painting.

Alongside this, the work also plays on themes of place/environment. Each paintings background involves the use of photo transfers as a means of embedding the subjects personal photo archives into the paintings. 

Through the use of translucent and semi translucent glazes of oil paint, these photo transfers are obscured to different degrees depending on their significance or clarity of memory. 

Thus the environments within each painting act as fluid spaces containing archival memories and stories from the past and present. A representation of the generations, time periods, places and memories that have informed our past, and which will continue to influence our future. 

The Awards support would provide the time and space to create a body of work without the need to immediately sell pieces or have to shift focus to commissions. I know this would allow me to take huge strides in my artistic development and research during what I feel is a crucial stage of my career.

Being in the third year of my career, I feel that I have acquired the necessary experience and confidence to realise this project by fully engaging with the local community. Something that is essential to my practice and this project.

Joshua Donkor (b. 1997, UK) is a Ghanian-British painter whose work uses portraiture as a tool to subvert monolithic portrayals of Black identity. 

Donkor approaches portraiture as a collaborative exercise between him and his sitters. His process involves meeting with the subjects of his paintings on multiple occasions and going through their personal effects and photographs. Donkor works with them to identify the images that most potently convey the details of their personal narrative, including family photos, fabrics, and personal belongings. Each portrait Donkor paints includes both the image of the sitter, as well as layered visual references to all of the items they picked out together. 

The material depth of the paintings comes about through Donkor’s method of transferring layer after layer onto the surfaces of his paintings. Using a range of different painting and printing and layering techniques, he literally embeds the histories of his sitters into the work. 

Although the subject matter of Donkor’s paintings is deeply personal and completely idiosyncratic—often having to deal with specific African roots and the individual experiences specific people have had growing up Black in Western societies—all types of viewers have been able to respond deeply to the images. Somehow, widely relatable content is communicated through the specificity of the images. 

“The clarity of memory has significance,” Donkor says. “You can listen to the conversation through the paintings and trace the stories through the person’s life.” 

This voyeuristic peek into private aspects of people’s lives, the lives of total strangers, complicates the White or colonial gaze. The monolith of Black identity becomes more complicated, creating a deeper heritage with which a wider range of people can ultimately connect. 

“My goal is to tell people’s individual stories,” Donkor says. “What essentially makes the work I do so accessible to so many people has to do with the fact that so many people have a background of being in between; between different cultures and different families. People are stuck in between different worlds that are equally part of themselves. That comes through in the work.”