Masked Memory by Rosalind Lemoh

Overview

Rosalind Lemoh is a Sierra Leonean-born Australian artist whose work explores fragility, power and gender through sculptural objects. Her practice combines assemblage, casting and industrial aesthetics influenced by Arte Povera and Confessional Art to draw on themes of the personal as political.

New works for her solo exhibition at Canberra Contemporary focus on personal cultural objects from Lemoh's family home in Sydney with reflections on the particularities of her connection to Mende and Themne cultures from West Africa. The relatively undiscussed topic of the African diaspora in Australia is brought to the fore as Lemoh threads ideas of arrival, masking, shifting senses of place and the blending of myth, fact and fiction as handed down through family storytelling.

Spanning across sculpture and photography, these new works continue the interplay within Lemoh's work that uses the role of memorial or remembering as a way of understanding ourselves in the present and the future.