My work combines abstract, non-representational compositions with conceptually based text and word fragments in painting and drawing. I incorporate figurative personages into my work, which add elements that occupy the liminal space between foreground and background. The motifs and texts I focus on appear in repetition and are developed through various series. They originate from multiple cultural contexts, and through their integration into my artwork, become part of my personal and cultural archive. The ‘Afronaut’ is a major recurring motif in my work. I first introduced the conceptual idea of the ‘Afronaut’ in 1999. The ‘Afronauts’ are dislocated characters who create and control their own image spaces, where they claim the power to define themselves and to re-negotiate identity ascriptions. These figures draw on the tradition of the Ghanaian trickster, “Anansi the Spider,” and his modern equivalents, loosely based on producers and musicians such as Lee“Scratch” Perry, Sun Ra, and George Clinton. They appear, drawn or painted, in a kind of spacesuit with varying head coverings such as helmets, hats, and caps. Their figurative presence generates disturbance in what is primarily a non-representational, homogeneous way of painting. The ‘Afronaut’ has transformed my work into what has been called “painting from the spaces in between”(Jochen Meister, Afronauts, 2007, p.14).