Larry Amponsah
‘When a Stone Cracks, We Don’t Stitch’, Exhibition text, 50 Golborne Gallery, London: 2019
This immersive, multi-media exhibition explores the unique street and neighbourhood in North Notting Hill, which the gallery calls home through the eyes and experiences of a young Ghanaian artist.
Rejecting restricted identifiers such as foreigner or outsider, Amponsah – who was born in Accra and studied painting in Kumasi, China, and then London, where he lives and works now – investigates how people from around the world travel, connect, and create communities. In his explorations of the market street of Golborne Road and its surrounding area characterised by waves of immigrants including the Caribbean Windrush Generation the artist has gathered secret histories, collective memories, and personal confrontations as material to create a new body of work. In his search for black excellence within diverse spaces, he references his own West African upbringing within a greater global narrative of how displacement and refraction can lead to collaboration and resilience.