“If you ask me for a studio visit, I’ll take you to the beach” Joie tells me over the phone, while pleading with her cat for some space to focus on our conversation. The energy is light and casual on this Thursday morning as we initiate our chat about her art, her queerness, her Africanness and how these different sides of her are forever intertwined.

When she picks up my call, I meet the painter sitting on the floor of her apartment, struggling to find a comfortable way to hold her phone for the next hour. Her dark locs are gently hugging her face and her bleached eyebrows interestingly remind me of my own. Joie’s funny spirit bleeds through the screen, as she’s always one beat away from another laugh, while answering my questions and sharing her experience in all honesty. The 25 year old considers herself as a free spirit. “I don’t like rules”, she confesses. Her favorite spot to create is outside, “on a mat, under the tree and the sun” as she describes it.

A good example of this aversion for rules is Joie’s first ever exhibition Stay with me, Chaos runs here. A space that she creates to challenge subjects that matter to her: queer rights and mental health in Africa, specifically in Ghana where she lives. The aim with this first collection of paintings is to share an universal experience, one that is too often hidden, while lived by so many. A choice that some might judge risky for an artist at this early stage of their career but that seems more than logical for Joie. “It would have not made sense to hide what the art was about”, she argues unapologetically.

We took our time to dive into her creative process, her convictions and her inspirations for this first body of work. We spoke about how art helped her overcome challenges in her life and how she’s now using it as a tool to tell important stories, to let people know “what is happening exactly”.

Why outside? What does it bring you to paint in that environment?

Why should I stay in a room when outside is pretty?

I need to go out and reconnect with nature, I’d go to the beach or anywhere else. Sitting in a room closed off from everything and just paint doesn’t make sense to me. I want to see the birds, the dogs, I want to talk to people. I want them to keep coming to me and ask me what I am doing. It’s interactive, it’s not boring. It’s also a form of inspiration.

The outside becomes your studio in a way.

Basically.

How practical is it? Let’s say you have to paint a large canvas for example, would you carry it to the beach as well?

Yes. I’d do it outside, in the grass.

The biggest piece for this exhibition we just had was Communion. It was two 40”x30” canvases side by side, put together to form this finished, larger piece. And I did it outdoors, on the floor, in the grass. The outside is definitely my studio. I don’t know why but I can’t do it inside. I believe it’s too confined while I’d prefer to be free.

I am a free spirit. I don’t like rules dictating how to do things this way or that.

It’s also interesting to work in “unconventional” spaces. People can have this access to you and interact with you more easily. They kind of become part of your process and participate in what you create too. At the end of the day it’s not just you, it’s also the people asking you questions, and the way the conversations you end up having shape the work you’re producing.

Yes, it allows this bouncing of ideas from each other I’d say. Also, my art is about queer rights and mental health in Ghana. So when people ask me about what I’m creating, I get to educate them about what is happening here.

In my paintings, I depict my mental disorders as characters. I use aliens as metaphors for society’s outcasts, for the weirdos. The ones that have been pushed aside. And whenever someone comes to me when I am painting, I get to talk about these topics. Maybe they leave learning a new mental health disorder, or they leave knowing the state of the country when it comes to queer rights. They’ve learned something, you know.

So creating outside is also doing what the art is supposed to do, tell people a story, let them know what is happening exactly. That’s why I like doing it.

When you take that opportunity to speak to people about queer rights and mental health in Ghana, how do they react?

People are surprised most of the time. They usually don’t know that this is what is happening in the country. When I’m speaking to Ghanaians particularly, they’re in support of the banning of queer people and queer rights. Then I explain that we’ve been here since before colonization, that we’ve been pushed outside in a country that is supposed to be for all of us.

Ghana’s national motto is “Freedom and Justice” but where is the freedom? I can’t find it. There’s freedom for men, but there’s no freedom for women. Queer people are not fully free and mental health patients are being left off the street because of stigma. There’s no freedom, when you truly think about it.

While I was having this conversation, someone answered that “Ghana is free, you can hold alcohol and walk down the street”. But freedom has nothing to do with alcohol. Here, we are talking about human rights. Queer people can’t hold hands and walk down the street without being attacked or ridiculed, without being told it’s un-ghanaian. People tell me all the time that it’s European nonsense. Meanwhile the Europeans banned it when they came here. So it was [definitely] here before they arrived.

It’s actually so frustrating considering that I got disowned because of it. For being queer and also for having ADHD and comfortably talking about it. My parents could not accept the fact that I’d openly talk about my mental disorder. They’d tell me that no one is going to hire someone who has a mental disorder, that I’m not going to get a job.

Have you ever experienced any harmful or aggressive reaction to what you share?

Yes, multiple times. I had people telling me that I am a liar, that I am only seeing it from that particular point of view because I didn’t entirely grow up in Ghana. And although it’s true that I’ve lived in different places and experienced various cultures, which made me open minded, I also know that there are people who’ve stayed in one country all their life and share that different view of queerness that I have. It all comes through educating ourselves.

People would say that it’s not Ghanaian and quote the Bible [to prove their point]. But those who banned queerness before are the same ones who brought religion. They demonized our own traditional practices, brought theirs as a means to colonize and control us and that is what you are using to hate.

Sometimes I also use the same Bible to counter their arguments. I’ve been told that “the Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman, not a man and a man…” But the Bible also says “love your neighbor as yourself”. I’m not religious, I’m not christian but, as someone who sat down and read it, I know it’s preaching love.

The person you claim to follow, Jesus, preached love and to not judge. How many times is “don’t judge” said in the Bible? He loved the prostitutes and the taxpayers. If he was here in today’s world, his current followers would be criticizing him, because he would be loving all the people they hate.

When I say those things, people just sit down quietly. Ghanaians are stubborn, what they know is what they know. They’re not going to change their mind. Although I had some people who took the time to think about it and who reached out to me afterwards saying “okay, I actually thought about what you said, and it makes sense so I’m going to sit down and go through it”. And I feel like that is me making a difference.

One person at the time I guess.

Joie has moved between different places throughout their life, from the UK, to South Africa and Spain where they were studying before returning home, to Ghana. “I came back to continue school and just never left”, they recall. The political science student welcomed painting in their life as a tool for survival, quickly distancing them from the subject of their studies. And although the art they create now could say the contrary, the artist still shies away from considering herself a political person. “I just don’t want to be involved in the political aspect of politics. Elections, government structurations, all of that is not me.” they confide.

Now, with their interest in human rights, non profit organisations, and history, Joie mainly uses what they studied in Political Science to navigate today’s era. This background is also present in the art they create.

How did you switch from Political Science to painting?

I had never touched a paint brush until two years ago.

A day after my parents disowned me, I went to one of my friends’ rooms at university. I was just sad and she gave me an empty canvas, some paint and told me I could use it to do whatever I’d like, just to let my emotions out. She told me it had helped her before so she thought it would help me too, that I should just try.

That was the first time I painted something. Then someone bought that painting the following week. This made me think that I could maybe survive out of it. I was just disowned and hopeless. I needed to find some way to get by, so I started painting. At first, I was just creating generic things to be honest, not anything that felt like what I do now. It always takes people some time to find their style, what they want to paint about. Even though I already knew I wanted to paint about queer rights.

One of the first paintings I made was about these two African lesbians fairies that I separated on each side of a river. I gave them wings thinking “they have wings and they can cross to each other but something is keeping them apart, basically society”. That was my first painting concept, so I knew that it was a subject I wanted to touch on because it was something I was experiencing. I just hadn’t gone fully in depth with it yet.

I was painting a lot at that time, mainly to sell. I needed to get out of homelessness. So I didn’t really and fully find my style until recently. I started sketching more and found out that I wasn’t drawn to realism for example. I cannot paint a person’s face at all. But I realised I could create characters and styles that represent who I am. These characters also represent the people I want to shed light on through my paintings, in a way the viewer would be able to understand [our lives’ experience] just by looking. So it’s telling a story.

That’s how I landed on the aliens. Because aliens tell you a story. They are pushed out, they’re treated as outcasts, no one wants them here. That’s how I feel. So why not paint these characters in an alienistic way to show that?

All my characters also have really long and exaggerated eyes because I feel like the eyes are the window to the soul. You can tell if a person is lying from their eyes. They would not look at you in the face. People fall in love because they stare at someone’s eyes too long.

I started giving my characters exaggerated eyes so you would look at them. That’s the first thing you see when you come across one of my works.

And now everyone is telling me that my paintings have my eyes.

I noticed that similarity as well, looking at your work. I reckon it wasn’t intentional.

I didn’t notice this similarity until the exhibition. People kept coming up to me, asking me if I was painting my own eyes. I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I think it was unconscious.

I unconsciously painted my eyes for whatever reason. I see the characters as myself so [I guess] that’s why this is happening.

Joie naturally leaves her marks in her paintings, with strokes that retell her life experience and borrow from her own physical features at times, making the art she creates unique but also relatable to the ones it speaks to the most.

In her work, the artist tells the story of the outcasts and the queers. She also aims to highlight the stigma around mental health in Ghana. And upon the opening of her first exhibition Stay with me, Chaos runs here, Joie was anxious about the public reaction to her art. “I was nervous, wondering whether or not people would hate it, whether or not they’d understand”, she shares. “Honestly, I was just scaring myself out, I forgot not everyone would get or understand my art” she continues.

But ultimately, people did understand what the artist was trying to share. “Someone even cried, you know, because of what they were going through at that moment. It was very easy for the people to relate, a lot of them saw themselves in the paintings”. The opening room was filled with people from her community showing up to support, talking to one another and forming circles to share their own stories.

I felt very content because my art was in these conversations. I think people really got it in the end. I thought they wouldn’t but they did.

What is your definition of home?

Home for me right now is my chosen family.

Home is my friends, my community. Home is the people I’ve met along my journey who made it ten times better. People I can call if I’m going through something. People I chose.

I started painting as a way to share about my situation. Then I found out that I wasn’t alone. When I started hanging out with the people in the queer and alternative communities, I understood that there were others like me and it felt like I had finally found a safe space where I could experience unconditional love.

If someone is going through something, the community quickly comes together to try and fix it or help. That’s when I realised the importance of having a chosen family.

What do you like about being queer and alternative?

We [always] come together, even though we don’t know each other. We could have met literally 5 seconds ago for example, but If someone is telling their story, we all gather, we listen, we give encouraging remarks. We are automatically here to help because we’ve been through it too. There’s more people who’ve experienced something the same way you have and we can be there for one another.

Also, alternative people love their raves!

I feel like it’s because raves are this one time outside the regular party programming where everyone can let loose, with no one having any expectations, no one dancing because someone is watching. It’s you, the music, your friends and good energy.

I like to talk about energy because I believe we feed onto the energy people give to us. I give you back the energy you give to me. And within this community, when you only have the 30% to give, you [always] find other people who’d have the 70% left, and we just hold each other up in that way. Someone is having an event, everyone is showing up, just to support and be like “hey we are here”.

What does it mean for you to be queer and African? Are these notions separate from one another in your life or are they always moving together?

That was the question I had before the exhibition.

In ‘Finding Our Way Home’ the essay inspiring my exhibition, the author Shakia Asamoah was also questioning this. Whether or not her identity as being Ghanaian and her identity as being queer were two separate entities.

She shares that her entire life she has been told that being queer is white people business. So when she grew up and realised she was bisexual, she was struggling to reconcile her Africanness with her queerness as the latter had been sold to her as European nonsense her whole life.

That was how I was feeling as well at the time. Then I thought about it and realised that queer people have always been here, they’ve never disappeared. They’ve been queer marriages before. There are Twi words like Obaa Besia1 that exist here and refer to different queer people. There are Twi words for these concepts and no words for more modern or recent ones. If we have words for it in our local dialects, then we were there before.

So, I can be African and queer.

The thing is, people in Ghana don’t think it’s possible. If you say you’re queer they automatically assume it has some sort of influence from the outside. And what I learned is that queer people are only seen as entertainment here. Fashion designers, musicians, party promoters... Anything outside of that, you don’t belong in our society.

One of the pieces I made, The Circus, has the Ghanaian flag as the background, the pride flag painted within it and a clown at the center. Let’s see the clown here as the metaphor. If you go to the circus and you see the clown you tell yourself “oh this clown belongs here” but if you see the clown out in the street, you’d run, because in your mind, he’s not supposed to be here. The clown is just meant to be in the circus, in the movies, right?

He’s just meant to be an illusion.

Exactly.

It’s the same way queer people in Africa are meant to feel like. You have no place outside of these industries. They won’t hire you for a 9-5. You’d have to work from home probably because of how you present yourself, because of your tattoos, your piercings, your manners, or any other identity features. Even the ones who don’t have any identifying features are limited.

Effeminate men are judged in their work place all the time. It’s like “what are you doing here, you have your spaces, stay there. In my world, you don’t belong”. The more people treat you like that, the more you start to believe it yourself and I think that’s what happens within the queer communities. People start to believe that they don’t belong and it takes a certain level of self reflection to realise that this is not right, that you are pushed out and put in a box.

But maybe sometimes you just have to break the box.

How do you break the box? Even within these boxes you mentioned, art and entertainment, African artists and creatives are still limited in how they showcase their creativity, specifically when their queerness is an important part of their process. It’s not easy to find spaces where you can showcase your art with a queer narrative.

It’s difficult to have spaces to create these types of work.

A lot of structures don’t want the backlash and it’s also hard to find residencies for queer artists. Most of them have themes and specific topics that they want to explore, and you hardly find any in Africa that are based around queer rights. The topics are always something that has nothing to do with what you do, so how do you even apply when you don’t fit in the theme?

I know that South Africa might be an option for example. But look at how many queer artists there are in Africa. If everyone is applying for the same residencies in South Africa, who is actually going to get in? The market is already oversaturated in Europe. There’s also a lot of queer artists there who are already applying for the residencies available. You don’t have many or any for Africans to even apply to. So how do you get your art out there?

That’s the question.

The thing is, with every fight for human rights, there’s a push back. It’s not going to be easy to find spaces to show your art. But you have to keep fighting, you have to force yourself into these conversations and spaces. When the curator and I were planning the exhibition, everyone was asking us if I was going to use a fake name or something of the sort because usually, that’s what people do. They’d use a fake name, or they don’t even put “queer” in the work’s narratives and social media captions. You’d just hide what it is, hoping the people in your community would just know and show up.

But we refused to work in anonymity. My art is about getting this knowledge out there. Queer people exist. We have our communities, we’re not just disappearing like you want us to. So it would have not made sense to hide my name. It would have not made sense to hide what the art was about. That’s why I like to go paint outside because if I’m not showing this art in a gallery, you’re going to see it somewhere, whether you want it or not. It’ll be in your face. You know what I mean?

I’m just pushing myself in those spaces that are trying to push me out and it’s not easy. It’s never easy. You have to make noise. If you keep doing it under a pseudonym, or a different name, not mentioning what it is, it’s not going to be spread as far as it needs to be.

When we posted that video about the art and the community, we thought “okay, we posted it on instagram, let’s call it a day, we’ve announced the exhibition and made the video”. It ended up being the most engaged post both the curator and I had ever had. We were shocked that it had actually gone far. We were shocked by the people who came for the exhibition wondering where they were all coming from. We were all just like “woaw!”

And it was just because of the word queer we included in the post. We made what the exhibition was about very clear. No missing words.

With these entry barriers, how do you sustain yourself? Has your art, with everything it represents, become sustainable?

Yes. I’m a full time artist now.

But it is still hard to be honest. Some months go by without selling anything, some others I don’t even paint anything. It just comes and goes.

The exhibition did well so I’m currently living off of that. But before the show, it was hard. Every month I had to find something to do to make ends meet and survive. I’ve had to make money in different ways, on the side. At this point, I’m versatile, make-up artist, art dealer, gallery assistant. I have done it all.

As a neurodivergent person in Ghana, how do you get the help that you need? When it comes to your medication for example, where are you getting them from?

The medication is hard to source here. The government only allows a certain amount to be shipped in the country every month. And it has to go through the main government’ hospitals before getting to the pharmacies which would have just one or two boxes. Some would not even get any during the month. I have to call twenty pharmacies each month to figure out which one has my medication to buy it. And they are expensive, selling between 1000₵ to 2000₵ for 30 pills. Which is insane. How do you even afford that? 2000₵ could be someone’s monthly rent in Accra.

At some point, I was taking the medication only when I thought I needed it, not everyday, so I could prolong how long I had them for.

People don’t really follow up on mental health. If they see a family member going through schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, it is said that they have gone mad, that the devil or their family witches has got them. And they just throw them on the streets. That’s why you have so many people just walking down the roads with no clothes, messy hair, covered with dirt. People who, if they are given the proper treatment they need, would not be in that position. They’d probably be in an office doing a whole 9 to 5 with you.

You can’t openly talk about mental health either. This creates some misconception around it. And if there’s a misconception around something in a whole country, how does it work? How do you convince people that it could be an easy fix? That it’s not the devil? That it’s not what you think, your family witches are not after you? In fact, some mental health disorders are hereditary, you probably have it, that’s why your child has it. So go back and think through your life. Maybe you too go get diagnosed.

But people are so scared of being seen as crazy and out of it that they wouldn’t even go get the test done unfortunately.

How does your mental disorder impact the art you make, or your capacity to make it?

I make pieces really quickly.

When I get into these moments where I’m hyperactive, I know that if I fall out of it, it will take another two months before I touch a canvas again. So I try to do everything within those moments, all at once. I try to stay on top of things. For example, I made most of the exhibition pieces just two weeks before the opening. I worked through a crunch time. I made ten of the twelve pieces for the exhibition in that two week period.

Outside, at the beach?

Yes. Outside at the beach, touching grass.

I think that’s how my brain works. I perform well in those crunch times and I’m able to do everything, all at once. But sometimes, it’s not in a rush. There are moments where I’m just in the mood to paint and then I just paint. The most it has taken me to finish a painting was probably one month because I just left it, I had lost interest and was coming back to it whenever I got the interest back. But usually, I’m very quick with it.

How do you feel about this first exhibition?

I feel relieved. I can finally have a portfolio that has something on it. I’m also happy that it brought the community together and that people did feel seen. I’m just grateful.

I made money, I can survive, I got my medication. The video is still being pushed out there. It’s still viewed everyday, it’s still part of the conversation and sharing what the exhibition is about, which is the queer and alternative community.

I’m just happy and proud to have been able to do that.

For Kukua Kweku-Badu, the curator of Joie’s first exhibition, Stay with me, Chaos runs here is “a call to queers to come and stand together” because “chaos runs where we are and for us to be safe, we need to come together to be able to deal with it.” The title depicts accurately a world where queers and especially African queers have to go through so much hardship to be able to survive. It also blends well with Joie’s inspiration sources and creative practice.

When Kukua proposed this title, I found it perfect because my work is somewhat chaotic. It’s a lot of colours and storytelling.

Joie paints using the different pride flags as their colour palette. “I didn’t want to just pick out colours randomly”, the artist explains. “Each flag has so many colours that sometimes don’t bounce off of each other the same way. They’re very opposite and you have to make it work in a way where it tells a story.”

The goal with this choice is to attract people, to make the pieces bold enough so that they catch the attention of the viewers, bring them in and create room to have these conversations that are important for the painter. “These topics are already difficult to talk about so if you use dark, moody colours, people will not want to interact with it”, they add.

Joie’s art might seem chaotic from afar but within that chaos, they’re telling us to be attentive, to listen and understand.

You know when there’s chaos, people run, so you have to tell them: this one is chaotic but relax, stay, try to understand. This is what we’re going through so stay here, pay attention.

Learn more about Joie Graham here!