Glamorously dressed women stand proudly posing against boldly coloured backgrounds, hanging out the car window, enjoying a moment of rest. Ghanaian artist Rufai Zakari’s portraits are stitched together from flattened, upcycled plastics to create vividly textured surfaces that bear a deep relationship to the land and local culture as well as to craft traditions. For his latest solo exhibition, Girls like us at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Tower Bridge, the artist pays homage to the strength, resilience and beauty of African women. The women that he depicts are mothers, sisters, wives, friends, entrepreneurs and traders. ‘They are’, says the artist, ‘the leaders of our society, the people who make it function even if their work is unrecognised, undervalued or misunderstood’.

Over the past few months Zakari has been interviewing the women in his family and surrounding community about how their experience of the world might challenge or dismantle society’s expectations. The title of the show comes from a repeated phrase that the women used both to express a sense of kinship and to describe the assumptions that are made about them based on their profession or social or economic position. As Zakari notes, ‘When a woman is seen to be living a certain type of lifestyle, people’s first assumption is often that there is a man behind her. The idea that she might be successful in her own right is rarely a consideration. I think there is also a common Western view that African women are all house wives when the reality, at least in Ghana, is that there are more women in business than men. Women are the ones making money and taking care of the family’.

Through his portraits Zakari seeks to make visible the unseen work and struggle of these women, to remind us that what we see on the outside is rarely the whole truth. Take, for instance, the portrait of a woman wearing a pink headscarf against a bright yellow and orange background. Like all of Zakari’s figures she appears self-assured and glamorous, wearing red lipstick and sunglasses balanced on her head. The circle behind her is like a halo or a spotlight, highlighting her importance while also hinting at her past struggle. In the circle there are silhouettes of women carrying heavy loads on their heads. It is an image that comes from Zakari’s childhood memories of seeing women, and his mother, carrying their possessions, often across vast distances, from villages to cities, but this form of transportation is also a paid profession for women in Ghana who are employed as kayaye, or head porters, in the markets. For the woman in this portrait the image can be understood as a vision of her past profession or the physical journeys she has had to make to create the life she wanted, but it could also suggest a different kind of burden (emotional or mental) that she has had to and perhaps continues to bear.

We encounter the same symbolism in the portrait of a woman sitting on a bed. Once again she is beautifully dressed and although her gaze is turned outward, she is in total command of the space: we are the intruders, disturbing her rest. Next to her in the mirror, we encounter a different vision: here is the woman sleeping in a pan that kayaye use to carry things on their head. The faded text of the labels forming the space around her creates an impression of movement and chaos in comparison to the calm order of the bedroom. Again, it is a story of unseen struggle, but even in the portraits which do not directly represent this idea of duality, the materiality of all of the work speaks to a history of labour and hardship as well as to renewal and repair. The compositions – the women and their possessions – are literally stitched together from found, upcycled trash which has been transformed, through art, into something not only beautiful but also valuable.

Zakari plays most obviously on this idea in the portrait of a woman driving a car made out of flattened Cadbury’s hot chocolate packets. From a distance the shininess of the packets and their distinctive shade of vivid purple creates an impression of preciousness; it is only when we more closely examine the surface that we can identify the labels for what they are. As Zakari says, ‘It’s only when we take the time to think about and get to know someone on a deeper level that we can begin to truly understand the full story and to see the whole picture’.