EDINBURGH.- Serge Attukwei Clottey is among the ten artists commissioned by His Majesty the King to create portraits honouring members of the Windrush Generation. Those depicted left countries in the Caribbean and arrived in the UK via the HMT Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. They made crucial contributions to local communities and industries following the war.

Clottey's portrait is of Laceta Reid, who settled in Newport, Wales, and worked for Crompton Batteries for nearly 27 years. Following his meeting with Reid in Wales, Clottey created the work with duct tape and oil paint on cork board, inspired by African lifestyle photography.

A BBC documentary tells the story of the creation of the portraits. The exhibition titled Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation will travel to the National Portrait Gallery in October.

The art of Serge Attukwei Clottey (b. 1985, Ghana) primarily employs found materials from the artist’s hometown in Accra, Ghana in order to create a dialogue with the city’s cultural history and identity.

Utilising everyday objects such as discarded Kufuor gallons, car tyres, and recycling boat wood as his canvas, Clottey inscribes patterns and text that uplift the miscellaneous materials into symbols of Ghana’s vernacular economic system of trade and reuse.

The celebration of the yellow gallon containers (initially used as cooking oil canisters and then recycled to collect water or fuel) applied throughout Clottey’s work, stems from a desire to find ways to inspire people to work with plastics and recycle it in creative ways. This has become a prominent motif throughout Clottey’s oeuvre, and the artist has named this distinctive practice ‘Afrogallonism’.

Clottey’s economic stance permeates his paintings as well as his sculptures. The artist employs cork in his paintings, a material that changes with prolonged exposure to the sun. Additionally, keeping in theme with the artist’s concern for his city’s culture and history, cork is often used in churches and around his hometown to disseminate information. Clottey’s fragmented approach to figuration recalls Western Cubist portraiture, a genre that drew heavily on formal elements of traditional African sculpture.

Palace of Holyroodhouse
Serge Attukwei Clottey in Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation
June 22nd, 2023 - September 18th, 2023