About Me

I am Vera Obeng, a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and photographer currently based in Auburn, Alabama. My practice began with photography, but over time I became increasingly interested in what happens when the photographic image moves beyond the flat surface and enters the physical world.

Working across photography, installation, photo transfer, wood, beads, fabric, found objects, and other materials, I explore three interconnected concerns: memory and absence, expanded portraiture and material transformation, and the body, identity, and burden.

At the centre of my practice is a continuing question:

How can a photographic image inhabit an object and transform it into a vessel of memory?

This question has led me to think of portraiture beyond the representation of a face or body. I am interested in the possibility that a portrait can also reside in an object, a material, a family possession, a fragment, a landscape, or the traces someone leaves behind. Through this approach, I explore how photographs and everyday materials can carry personal and collective histories, particularly when the person or experience they refer to is absent.

My works, including Our Forefathers, Beautiful Burden, The Extent of Nothingness, and Remnants of Portraiture, move between intimate memory and broader questions of ancestry, femininity, visibility, labour, loss, and belonging. Material is important to this process. Wood, beads, fabric, photographs, and found objects are not simply surfaces on which images are placed; they bring their own histories, textures, weight, and associations into the work.

I am interested in what happens when these materials encounter photography: when an image becomes tactile, when an object begins to behave like a portrait, and when something ordinary becomes capable of holding the memory of a life.