Distorting Inflections: Proprioception in Senam Okudzeto’s Works-on-Paper

My work examines a collection of never before exhibited painting by trans-national, multi-medium artist Senam Okudzeto (b. 1972). Shown only to friends, this not-yet-named 2014 abstract series possess a very different aesthetic inclination than her 2001 detail-oriented ink drawings, depicting three nude, brown-skin womxn floating in space. I compare these works-on-paper to demonstrate the artist’s evolving reliance on material and figurative distortion as an analytic that signals the non-visual sensory register proprioception— the sense responsible for understanding the body in space. While my research reads across archival and theoretical texts to foreground distortion as a formative concept in black diaspora studies, in this paper, I center my analysis on Hortense Spillers’ use of distortion in her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” These 2014 paintings were created during a period when the artist was living with a series of symptoms that placed her in and out of exhaustive states of discomfort, pain, and memory loss. By looking at the labor of practice— events of encounter between body and material— I draw attention to Okudzeto’s delineation of proprioception as a series of body parts mediated in space. Specifically, I argue Okudzeto’s emphasis on the non-continuity of limbs and torsos focuses proprioception as a predominant sensory register of the visual realm that challenges the vexed relationship between visuality, blackness and figurations of wholeness.