Na Chainkua Reindorf

My work is informed and inspired by the visual language of West African textiles and the custom of using these textiles as a means of communication. I am equally fascinated by our widespread relationship with textiles almost exclusively as objects with specific functions. The work I make aims to alter our experience with, and reliance on, these materials as utilitarian by rendering them as meaningful aesthetic objects to be encountered.

As a cosmopolitan citizen, I have become acutely aware of the many nuanced differences between Ghana and the United States; both of which I consider to be home. I have found that by using commonplace materials in multiple manifestations, I can propose comparisons between aspects of the socio-political and cultural spheres of these two spaces.

I fold and mold, bend and coat, weave, and wrap to transform elements of the familiar. I deliberately employ materials, including jute, yarn, plastic lace and wire, that, like textiles, have charged cultural and symbolic histories of their own. This is particularly significant to my work because in moving between inter-continental cultural spaces, these transformed materials are given new meanings and thereby accumulate additional interpretive layers that operate both on the individual and collective level.