Need to know the grotesque reality concerning the oil business? Then have a look at their cheesy paperweights

[ad_1] I n her vibrant Glasgow studio, artist Tanoa Sasraku is displaying me her assortment of paperweights produced by oil firms. “I discover them so alluring, nearly like fragrance bottles or snow globes, however so grotesque,” she explains as we deal with the etched and sculpted objects, which every have a treasured drop of crude oil at their centre. “They've these shiny, dazzling exteriors, however once you get shut you see the dying mulch inside. All displays of energy are fragile; they collapse when you get shut sufficient.”

Sasraku’s paperweights kind the centrepiece of Morale Patch, her forthcoming solo exhibition on the ICA in London: a poetic interrogation of the position of oil in geopolitics and nationwide id. Drawn from oil-producing nations world wide, the cheesy paperweights embody each the seductive attract of extraction and the pomposity and fragility of its ensuing wealth and energy. Like an absurd sport of Battleships, they're displayed on a grid of velvet-lined jewelry boards forming a map of worldwide oil manufacturing – and subsequent battle. “I used to be fascinated with oil alliances and clashes between nations and this stalemate that has occurred. Once you map them out, you get the sense that if one warhead went off, it might all collapse.”

I bought into bidding wars for paperweights on eBay The work in Morale Patch is ostensibly an about-turn for the 29-year-old, Plymouth-born artist recognized for tactile works utilizing pigment drawn from soil and supplies soaked within the ocean. But it surely initially stemmed from her perennial preoccupation: the narrative energy of natural supplies, on this case crude oil. “It’s dying matter: the product of marine our bodies and prehistoric crops pressurised underneath the bottom,” Sasraku says, “but it surely unleashes as a life power; it explodes out of the bottom and powers human growth.” She visited websites of oil manufacturing in Scotland, the place she relocated from London in 2024, however wished to get her arms on the crude materials. Oddly, it was most simply sourced within the tiny quantities inside paperweights commissioned by oil firms as company items.

‘I used to be pondering of politicians taking part in struggle video games of their places of work’ … a element of Shell, a custom-made paperweight. {Photograph}: Courtesy the artist She grew to become obsessive about accumulating as many as attainable. “I felt like I needed to gather the world’s supply of them,” she laughs. “It grew to become a part of my every day observe to sort in key phrases on eBay and get into bidding wars.” She describes one significantly fierce however sadly unsuccessful contest over a paperweight produced to commemorate a Kylie Minogue live performance in Aberdeen within the early Nineties – “such a bizarre combine of popular culture and Scottish business.”

Sasraku additionally bought her personal paperweights made for the present, utilizing a Highlands-based firm that produces company ones (“They might have made some in my assortment”). A few of these take the type of navy coffins with flags draped over them, their treasured cargo not useless our bodies however pen ink.

Wall-based works within the present additionally allude to flags – fragile issues created from soaked, stacked newsprint held along with bulldog clips. “The entire present is created from workplace ephemera,” she says. “I used to be fascinated with politicians taking part in struggle video games of their places of work, toying with the lives of others.”

‘We’re fed this logic’ … Tanoa Sasraku. {Photograph}: Belinda Lawley In each its discovered objects and fabricated work, Morale Patch performs with a very gaudy design sensibility impressed by Sasraku’s repulsion and fascination with Eighties Americana. “The emotions from that point about ambition, greed and masculinity have actually outlined the place we are actually in geopolitics,” she explains. “Take a look at Donald Trump. He’s bought big power-suited shoulders and makes use of language like a jock from an 80s movie.”

Symbols of American ambition are dotted round her studio, the place artwork supplies are saved alongside cheerleaders’ pom-poms and aspirational classic adverts. The identical theme is current in an ongoing collection primarily based on patterns for males’s clothes, equally impressed by the exaggerated shapes of energy fits and the work of Sasraku’s late father, the celebrated Ghanaian designer Kofi Ansah.

Making this work has been a means of interrogating her relationship with the “dominant tradition” of America. As a toddler, her consumption of US TV was mirrored in “my vernacular, my clothes, even meals that appeared interesting”. She remembers discovering out about 9/11 through footage of Michael Jackson watching the information, “this conflict of the last word American icon, and the occasion that modified the course of western historical past.” As a youngster, she yearned for the perceived glamour of an American life, however in 2025 that has modified. “My curiosity in America has remained however my want to be American has actually shifted.”

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‘Loss of life mulch inside’ … one other from Sasraku’s assortment. {Photograph}: Courtesy the artist The ICA’s location on the Mall signifies that Sasraku’s work can be seen in shut proximity to symbols of one other nationwide energy. “Sure, down the highway from the historic seat of energy” – Buckingham Palace – “with the nationwide flag of Britain repeating in a chorus. That’s very a lot been considered,” she says.

It goes with out saying that the imagery and concepts in Morale Patch are significantly charged proper now, however the course of of creating the work has been cathartic for its artist. “Particularly with Britain, Israel, America, Russia and Ukraine, we’re fed this logic as to why sure nations are aligned as allies,” Sasraku concludes. “If you consider the place the oil is, what mineral assets are required to take care of these relationships, they’re revealed as very flimsy.

“That’s been helpful to grasp, significantly on this second, when there’s a lot obscene violence being co-signed by the UK. Now the actual impetus behind all of that is smart to me, which is liberating.”