Theresah Ankomah - The Lore of Care: Maternal Acts of Devotion: Gallery I, Accra

Following an eight-month residency with Gallery 1957 in Accra, Theresah Ankomah presents a new body of work exploring motherhood, care, and the forms of knowledge carried across generations.

Her multidisciplinary practice engages with locally sourced and repurposed materials to examine craft economies, material histories, and the politics of labour. In The Lore of Care: Maternal Acts of Devotion, these longstanding concerns take on a more intimate dimension, drawing on the artist’s experience of pregnancy and motherhood, alongside her encounters with other women, to consider care as a sustained practice of attention, labour, and devotion.

Through familiar domestic gestures, Ankomah reveals how seemingly ordinary acts become forms of authorship, connecting personal experience to the wider histories of materials, women’s work, and collective care. Ankomah presents care as an embodied practice enacted through hands and bodies, sustained through time, patience, and continuous attention. Her approach to making becomes an act of tending, reflecting the ongoing commitment required to nurture motherhood, engage with materials, and sustain relationships. 

The Lore of Care: Maternal Acts of Devotion invites us to reconsider the often-overlooked labour of care, not as a series of obligations, but as a practice through which knowledge is transmitted, relationships are maintained, and devotion is carried across generations.

Download the press release & curatorial text below for more information