Next in Ones to Watch is Sènami Donoumassou, whose experimental photograms won her the inaugural James Barnor Prize
With a richly diverse background in drawing, painting, graphic design and illustration, Sènami Donoumassou began to develop “a particular interest in light as a medium, having always been fascinated by the effects of light and shadow”. Donoumassou is based in Benin, where she was born and raised, but it was during a one-month residency at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, France, in 2018 that she started exploring photograms “as a way of merging my artistic practice”. Her images appear phantasmic and eerie, yet substantial all the same: spirited and macular, animated but hushed, alluding to layers beneath the mantle of reality.
She employs photosensitive silver paper and light to fashion camera-less images, thinking of the photogram as a form of sculpture in which she shapes the paper’s two-dimensional surface with traces left by light. Using archival photographs or images she has taken herself, as well as various materials such as water, sand or leaves, she finds ways to rediscover contact with matter and texture in her creative process, elements familiar to her from painting. “With this technique, each image created is singular, and there’s also an element of randomness,” she says. “I see photosensitive paper as a metaphor for the human body and mind, each one bearing traces of its relationship with the world, its past, its community.”
