About
El-ham Tabsoba is a Ghanaian visual artist.
Statement / Bio
El-ham Tabsoba's practice centres on figurative oil painting. Human figures anchor her work as she examines relationships between people, place, memory, consumption, endurance, transformation and environmental inheritance. Her paintings bring individual and collective experience into view, asking how bodies carry the effects of systems and environments shaped before them.
Individual and grouped figures move between portraiture and shared presence. Their gestures, proximity and repeated forms hold the tension between personal memory and collective histories, while accumulated surfaces make time, pressure and change physically visible.
Tabsoba works through oil paint, texture and, when the meaning of a work calls for it, shredded recycled plastic. Plastic is not used as a fixed signature or in every painting; it enters the surface when its histories of use, movement, waste and survival can deepen the work.
Across the work, the body becomes a place where social and environmental experience meet. The paintings consider identity as something shaped through inherited conditions, human connection and the continuing possibility of transformation.
Process
Plastics collected in Accra from local waste streams are sorted, shredded and integrated into painted surfaces. These materials carry traces of human activity while introducing physical layers that reflect memory, movement and transformation.
