Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner's father-in-law;
A private collection.

El Anatsui began his artistic training at the College of Art, University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where he was given a grounding in Western art traditions and practices. Wanting to connect with the arts of his own country, he began to visit the Kumasi National Cultural Centre on weekends. Here he was exposed to weavers, potters, cloth-printers and carvers, all working in indigenous methods.

El Anatsui began to incorporate elements from these crafts into his own work, forging a distinctly Ghanaian aesthetic. The present work employs the colours and geometric symbols traditionally used for Asante Adinkra cloth. The age-old Adinkra patterns are counter-posed by modern construction techniques. The planks of wood have been cut with a chainsaw and blackened with an acetylene torch. For the artist, the tearing of the saw through wood functioned as "a metaphor for the way in which the western powers had carved up and brutally divided the African continent amongst themselves, ripping through and destroying both local history and culture".

In Anatsui's hands, as Elizabeth Péri-Willis has described, "wood becomes cloth bearing the traces of codes, scripts and ideograms". This effect is commonly achieved with the use of a rotary saw to create "dense hatched patterns reminiscent of the warps and wefts of woven cloth-based themes", a technique which emphasises the connections between Anatsui's wall pieces and adinkra and kente cloths.

Anatsui began to collect disused mortars and house posts in 1980s Nsukka, Nigeria. He would then lay all the different pieces of wood on the floor and carve into them, often using a chainsaw. Although when completed, the wooden slats look organised and are each individually numbered on the reverse, they are not necessarily designed to be hung in that exact order. "With the wood, I would put numbers behind the slats serially, but these numbers were just an initial proposal. The arrangements are all just proposals, not the final say." The wooden wall hangings are thus designed to be fluid, with no formal set arrangement.

El Anatsui's work can be found in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., The Newark Museum, New Jersey, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The British Museum, London, Guggenheim, New York and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. More recently, El Anatsui was commissioned to exhibit his sculptural installations in the Turbine Hall Space at the Tate Modern in London.

We are grateful to El Anatsui for confirming the present work's title.

Bibliography
L. Binder, El Anatsui: When I last wrote to you about Africa, (Seattle, 2010).
J. Picton, El Anatsui: A Sculpted History of Africa, (London, 1995), pp.34-36.
E. A. Péri-Willis, 'Chambers of Memory', in J. Picton (ed.), El Anatsui: A sculpted history of Africa, (London, 1998).
El Anatsui: New Worlds, (Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 2014), p. 41.
Susan Mullin Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, (Prestel), p. 37.
John Picton, El Anatsui: A Sculptured History of Africa, (Saffron Books, 1998), p. 85.