The starting point to Prempeh’s paintings is the matter of blackness – the tonal properties of the colour establishes the ground to her paintings and a cinematic basis to invoke and project memories of events, people, and places to emphasise an appreciation of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood and transformation.

Schlag metal, a brass alloy of copper and zinc imitative of gold leaf, is a material that Prempeh applies to selected areas of her often large-scale paintings. Over time this oxidises creating slow, live visual changes that animate the image and create a meta-narrative around our experiences of the passing of time, memory and its representation.

Prempeh occasionally experiments with projected still and moving imagery to create painting installations that invite other experiential and performative encounters with her work. During her residency she has spent time exploring the possibilities of projection mapping in her practice in collaboration with artist SCARLETTMOTIFF.

Prempeh’s most recent explorations heavily focus on the ‘Home’ a theme that she has continued to mould throughout her career, with early narratives starting with family as a basis of understanding her existence in Britain as part of the Afro- Caribbean population. Most recently Prempeh has been exploring the home to investigate mechanisms people within the diaspora might establish, trying to grasp an identity in (un)familiar environments.

She delves into the world of magic realism in an attempt to re-examine the diaspora through storytelling and myth and how it can act as a cushion for harsh truths. This includes examining the relationships between different cultures trying to occupy a singular space allocated to them through previous colonial intervention. Exploring the home, whether in acceptance of or while exploring the return to, is an artistic commentary on the circularity and malleability of time and memory, and how it will allow her to present visual queries that can prompt unexpected answers to otherwise existential questions.