In her bright Glasgow studio, artist Tanoa Sasraku is showing me her collection of paperweights produced by oil companies. “I find them so alluring, almost like perfume bottles or snow globes, but so grotesque,” she explains as we handle the etched and sculpted objects, which each have a precious drop of crude oil at their centre. “They have these shiny, dazzling exteriors, but when you get close you see the death mulch inside. All presentations of power are fragile; they collapse once you get close enough.”
Sasraku’s paperweights form the centrepiece of Morale Patch, her forthcoming solo exhibition at the ICA in London: a poetic interrogation of the role of oil in geopolitics and national identity. Drawn from oil-producing nations around the world, the tacky paperweights embody both the seductive allure of extraction and the pomposity and fragility of its resulting wealth and power. Like an absurd game of Battleships, they are displayed on a grid of velvet-lined jewellery boards forming a map of worldwide oil production – and subsequent conflict. “I was thinking about oil alliances and clashes between nations and this stalemate that has occurred. When you map them out, you get the sense that if one warhead went off, it would all collapse.”
The work in Morale Patch is ostensibly an about-turn for the 29-year-old, Plymouth-born artist known for tactile works using pigment drawn from soil and materials soaked in the ocean. But it initially stemmed from her perennial preoccupation: the narrative power of organic materials, in this case crude oil. “It’s death matter: the product of marine bodies and prehistoric plants pressurised under the ground,” Sasraku says, “but it unleashes as a life force; it explodes out of the ground and powers human development.” She visited sites of oil production in Scotland, where she relocated from London in 2024, but wanted to get her hands on the crude material. Oddly, it was most easily sourced in the tiny amounts within paperweights commissioned by oil companies as corporate gifts.
She became obsessed with collecting as many as possible. “I felt like I had to collect the world’s source of them,” she laughs. “It became part of my daily practice to type in keywords on eBay and get into bidding wars.” She describes one particularly fierce but sadly unsuccessful contest over a paperweight produced to commemorate a Kylie Minogue concert in Aberdeen in the early 1990s – “such a weird mix of pop culture and Scottish industry.”
Sasraku also got her own paperweights made for the show, using a Highlands-based company that produces corporate ones (“They may have made some in my collection”). Some of these take the form of military coffins with flags draped over them, their precious cargo not dead bodies but pen ink.
Wall-based works in the show also allude to flags – fragile things made from soaked, stacked newsprint held together with bulldog clips. “The whole show is made from office ephemera,” she says. “I was thinking about politicians playing war games in their offices, toying with the lives of others.”
In both its found objects and fabricated work, Morale Patch plays with a particularly gaudy design sensibility inspired by Sasraku’s repulsion and fascination with 1980s Americana. “The sentiments from that time about ambition, greed and masculinity have really defined where we are now in geopolitics,” she explains. “Look at Donald Trump. He’s got huge power-suited shoulders and uses language like a jock from an 80s film.”
Symbols of American ambition are dotted around her studio, where art materials are stored alongside cheerleaders’ pom-poms and aspirational vintage adverts. The same theme is present in an ongoing series based on patterns for men’s clothing, equally inspired by the exaggerated shapes of power suits and the work of Sasraku’s late father, the celebrated Ghanaian fashion designer Kofi Ansah.
Making this work has been a process of interrogating her relationship with the “dominant culture” of America. As a child, her consumption of US TV was reflected in “my vernacular, my clothing, even food that seemed appealing”. She remembers finding out about 9/11 via footage of Michael Jackson watching the news, “this clash of the ultimate American icon, and the event that changed the course of western history.” As a teenager, she yearned for the perceived glamour of an American life, but in 2025 that has changed. “My interest in America has remained but my desire to be American has really shifted.”
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The ICA’s location on the Mall means that Sasraku’s work will be seen in close proximity to symbols of another national power. “Yes, down the road from the historic seat of power” – Buckingham Palace – “with the national flag of Britain repeating in a refrain. That’s very much been taken into consideration,” she says.
It goes without saying that the imagery and ideas in Morale Patch are particularly charged right now, but the process of making the work has been cathartic for its artist. “Specifically with Britain, Israel, America, Russia and Ukraine, we’re fed this logic as to why certain countries are aligned as allies,” Sasraku concludes. “If you think about where the oil is, what mineral resources are required to maintain these relationships, they’re revealed as very flimsy.
“That’s been useful to understand, particularly in this moment, when there’s so much obscene violence being co-signed by the UK. Now the real impetus behind all of that makes sense to me, which is liberating.”
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Tanoa Sasraku: Morale Patch is at the ICA, London, from 7 October to 11 January