Yeboah’s first solo exhibition opened in November at the Women’s Art Collection at the University of Cambridge – home to artworks by the likes of Turner Prize winning artist Lubaina Himid, who has visited the exhibition. Due to popular demand (a record number attended the opening) the show Renaturation: Fractured Identities, Future Selves has been extended to June. Yeboah’s show also made history as she is the first student to exhibit in the Collection. The exhibition explores three interconnected concepts of the Ghanaian self, a response to the ongoing effects of colonialism, and offering a chance for healing and imagining a different future, through art.

Yeboah’s champion for The Wick is Karen Livingstone, Deputy Director (Masterplan, Exhibitions, Design) at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She said: “It is both fitting and special to champion the artist Debbie Yeboah, who I first met in Cambridge at Murray Edwards College, home to the largest collection of work by women artists in Europe and which is open and free for all to visit. Debbie is currently showing her first solo exhibition of work at the college, extended to the end of June by popular demand. I admire Debbie and her art enormously, for her vision and fortitude and the way her art speaks to both personal and universal concerns. There is a dynamism to her paintings, mixed media works and braided hair installations – through which she makes visible themes of healing, identity and Ghanaian cultural resistance. I find her work very moving and visually engaging.”

With irrepressible colour and movement, Yeboah’s works reference bodies in direct and oblique ways, depicting female figures in paintings and mixed media works, or evoking the body in curtains of braided hair. The works are informed “as much by the silences in the canon as by the students I’ve taught; those who draw white bodies when asked to paint themselves. I’m inspired by the skillful braiding in the din of a Ghanaian salon, and the inimitable wordsmithery of Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter; the theory-building of Walter Mignolo. I’m very interested in how the body, though scarred by history, can still be an active site of profound becoming.”

The day before her first exhibition was unveiled to the public, Yeboah gave her PhD defense at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD thesis in Education focuses on the ways in which contemporary African artwork can be used as a pathway for decolonizing curricula. Having her academic research and artistic practice come together so successfully in this way “really highlighted the interconnectedness between my research and art-making.”

As she prepares for her next exhibition – to be held in Ghana, later this year, Yeboah says she is digging deeper into the material side of her practice, and expanding on her enveloping installation works. “This is the most meditative work for me, that reckons with what has been broken, and forgotten and what might still be mended through elevated form. It’s basically a more in-depth sculptural investigation into hair, reconstitution, and the intimate politics of re-making the self.”