Red Dry-Cell

Location

Country: Switzerland
City: Berne
Place: British Embassy

Tanoa Sasraku works in sculpture, drawing and film. Her sense of belonging to Britain’s rural landscape and interest in the natural colour tones of these places led her to look more closely at the minerals within that landscape. Sasraku  spent time foraging for these minerals in the West Country, where she was born, and in Scotland, where her partner is from. The squares seen in this series of ‘cell’ sculptures reference the characteristic check pattern of Scottish tartan – many tartans originally had colours derived from the natural pigments of the areas their clans were linked to. 

This sculpture is one of a series of small, cell-phone sized objects. They were made with clay cast in bronze and were initially shown with a group of wall mounted paper sculptures that Sasraku calls ‘terratypes’. Each ‘terratype’ is made with multiple layers of newsprint, and designs inspired by both the Fante Asafo flags of coastal Ghana and the geometric forms of Tartan cloth.  Sasraku coloured these with foraged  pigments and placed alongside each of them one of her series of wet and dry cell sculptures. The stones used for the pigments in her ‘terratypes’ are embedded in the ‘cell’ sculptures, with the names of the precise locations they were found in, included in the label for each work. 

With the gentle presence of the earth in these works conveying a sense of quiet energy the ‘cells’ seem like switches to activate that circuit. Sasraku’s  ‘cells’ are inspired by the Baghdad Battery, the name given to a set of ancient artefacts discovered in Iraq, consisting of a clay pot, a copper tube and an iron rod. Found together, the pot in which they were stored bore traces of  acidic electrolyte liquid, leading some archaeologists and historians to argue that the pot represented an ancient battery.

Tanoa Sasraku was born in Plymouth. Her practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, print and filmmaking. She grew up in the West Country with both white British and Ghanaian heritage, which informs the explorations of identity and queer cultural histories in her work. Sasraku graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2018 and is currently enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. Forthcoming group exhibitions of her work include UNBUILD, Drawing Room, London (2023); Venice Architectural Biennale, Venice (2023); Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Newlyn (2023). Recent exhibitions including her work have been held at CCA Goldsmiths, London, UK (2022); O’Pierrot: Alex Vardaxoglou Gallery, London (2021); Chelsea Sorting Office (2021); Klosterruine, Berlin, (2020); LUX Moving Image, London (2020); Resist: be modern (again), John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (2019); and Tate St Ives, UK (2019). Sasraku’s moving image works have been screened at the BFI Southbank (as part of the 18th London Short Film Festival (2021)) and at Selected X, VideoClub online and touring (2020) and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick-upon-Tweed (2019). In 2021, Sasraku was awarded the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Visual Arts.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Tanoa Sasraku (1995 - )

Title

Red Dry-Cell

Date

2022

Medium

Patinated cast bronze, resin glue, foraged Quiraing red ochre

Dimensions

height: 14.2 cm; width: 7.5 cm; depth: 2 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Vardaxoglou Gallery, with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, November 2022

Provenance

Vardaxoglou Gallery ; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 25 November 2022

GAC number

19118