Larry Achiampong

Larry Achiampong was a 2019 recipient of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists.

“To add, one of my children has a disability and is immunocompromised. Coming from poverty and into the art scene tends not to result in a future for people like me.”

Achiampong is clear about his place in the art world. ​“I’m a bit of an anomaly. I’ve come from poverty, growing up in East London, and Dagenham, and it’s not something I like to go on about, but my trajectory is quite particular, and I think my experience… in the art world it’s only talked about at surface level.” Tellingly, he doesn’t think this experience comes across because he works so hard, ​“but I work so hard because of the trauma of poverty.” The work masks the deep precarity that’s shaped his life. 

The work also masks the impact of the pandemic, because from the outside, it seems he has simply continued on the upward trajectory of the pre-pandemic years. Across 2022–23, Baltic, Turner Contemporary and MK Gallery presented Achiampong’s first major solo exhibition. Its invitation predates the Award and its development was interrupted by the pandemic. But if anything, his central preoccupations were only heightened by the impact of Covid: ideas around placement, migration, class, issues that really affect the UK. In hindsight, he recognises the unintended benefit the extra time Covid gave him to work on it. 

The exhibition brought together a major new feature length film, Wayfinder (2022), and works of sculpture, installation, sound, collage, music and performance, drawing on his shared and personal heritage to explore class, gender, shifting notes of identity, the intersection between popular culture and the residues of colonisation. Other awards and nominations have proliferated: in 2020 Achiampong was awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship, he was BAFTA longlisted in 2023 for Wayfinder, and he’s just been nominated again for the Jarman Award for Ghost Data, after being nominated in 2021 for his solo work including The Expulsion and Relic 3.

Gaming has been hugely important to Achiampong. His work Gaming Room created a communal environment towards a phenomena that has been instrumental to his work and practice. ​“In some ways it was quite unacceptable,” and he notes with interest how it’s become more acceptable in the art world over recent years. Now, he’s about to head to Cologne for GamesCom2024 as part of a new commission – this time from an actual video game company: ​“It’s going to be a real video game, not an art game.” 

For Achiampong, the power of the Award lies in how it treats the artists’ situation with ​“a decorum and respect that most institutions fail to honour.” The ​‘no-strings’ element was crucial: ​“normally there are all sorts of things attached and they create their own pressure,” when what he really needed was to learn to drive: ​“I’d just moved back out to Essex where I’m based now. And I needed to be able to get around, as a co-parent, so it allowed me to do an intensive driving course and also get a car.” The other power of the Award was how it acted as an acknowledgment. ​“I live and breathe this stuff, creating, making, so when an Award recognises these kinds of things that means something.” It recognised his tenacity. 

And it’s these two things together – the money plus the lack of expectation – that he believes made it just totally transformative.

He’s very aware of the wider work Paul Hamlyn Foundation does to support people from backgrounds like his, and sees this as another string to the Awards’ bow.

I ask him if he’s comfortable to say a bit more about his experience of fatherhood as an artist, and he lights up. His son is now nearly 16, his daughter 10: ​“Being a father, being a parent, being a Black parent, there’s so much going on there.” He suggests the art world still doesn’t make space for having children: ​“Even though there’s more said about it now, the art world still says somewhere ​‘if you have kids, you’re not taking your art seriously anymore’. I remember people telling me when I was a young father, that my career was now over before it had even really started. People start breathing differently when I said ​‘I’m a parent’. But I’m quite a stubborn person, so when I heard that, I was angry and pissed off first of all, but then I was like, well, give it a few years, a bit of time, let’s see about that.”

That stubbornness comes from his mum: ​“She has an iron will, she has such charisma, and determination, and that’s really kept me going until now really.” His parents came to the UK in the late 70s following political unrest in Ghana, and his Akan heritage is often a starting point for his work. 

While the UK art scene still has a lot to answer for in creating problems for parents, his experience in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, earlier this year paints a much more positive picture. ​“There was a practitioner who had a child there who couldn’t be older than two, and we just all helped look after her and it was just, normal.” He strongly believes that trying to separate work from ​‘all this other stuff’ tears people apart, emotionally and relationally. 

His son has appeared in some of his works, notably as the first Relic Traveller, eight years ago. Much of his work examines digital identities and constructions of ​‘the self’, offering multiple perspectives that reveal the deeply entrenched inequalities. The Relic Traveller project has, since 2017, explored his concerns with nationalism following the Brexit vote in 2016: ​“For me, a place that closes its borders isn’t just closing its doors to people, it’s closing its doors to culture, and so, over time, it becomes a relic.” This summer, his son did work experience with him, and he took him to Tilbury Docks [where SS Empire Windrush landed in 1948] and explored some of the painful history of immigration. ​“He now towers over me, and it was such a beautiful moment: this is an extension of me, this is my son, these are new ways of working… For me, it was also about making that gesture about shame, and the unspoken languages that take place within the arts scene.”

It brings him back to reflecting on the uniqueness of the Awards. ​“The event was lovely. Bring your family, bring the people most important to you. It’s nurturing, it’s such a nurturing space and you’re being so looked after. I’m not used to that. I think that’s a really special thing.” It was also one of the first applications where he was directly and unashamedly able to talk about being a parent, to talk about mental health. ​“Don’t get me wrong, there’s amazing things about the arts scene and I love what I do, but there’s a lot wrong with it too. We just don’t have space and time to talk about this stuff.” 

He believes the artist’s voice has become more important than ever. Social media has changed the way people interact and artists are not only able to connect much more, but become a voice for those who often cannot speak. He recognises this is an individual choice, but,

Wayfinder, his 2022 feature, follows a young girl’s intrepid journey across England, from Hadrian’s Wall in the North to Margate in the South, and the people and places she encounters. It features a ​‘griot’ – a term originating with West African travellers who hold oral stories, whether that’s through song, literature and various approaches to art. I can’t help thinking Achiampong is, perhaps, a griot of our times.