Memory as Material

The first space I knew was a house in Bamenda with walls the color of dried earth. I do not remember it photographically — I remember it the way the body remembers: as a set of sensations, of temperatures, of the way light fell through a particular window at a particular hour.

When I paint a house, I am not painting architecture. I am painting that temperature, that light, that feeling of a threshold between inside and outside, between safety and the vast world. The houses in my paintings are not buildings — they are vessels. They hold what the body cannot carry into adulthood.

Memory is not a record. It is a material — like pigment, like charcoal, like gold. It can be layered, scraped back, dissolved, rebuilt. The painting becomes a place where memory is worked, not merely depicted.