Bevy of Beauty

We Don’t Break – We Translate Light

A solo exhibition by Yvette Nsiah

20 December 2025 – 31 January 2026

There is something immediately disarming about encountering portraits on glass.

As I step into the conference hall at Miklin Hotel—temporarily transformed into an exhibition space—the first sensation is light. It pools on polished tile floors and rebounds softly off suspended panes of wired glass. The works do not hang obediently on walls; they stand. Elevated on slender black metal frames, they occupy the room like bodies—upright, alert, facing one another. The arrangement feels intentional, almost ceremonial.

Yvette Nsiah’s Bevy of Beauty unfolds in the round.

The wired glass—industrial, familiar, almost invisible in everyday architecture—becomes the unlikely surface for a series of black-and-white portraits of women. From a distance, the faces appear photographic, as if screen-printed onto translucent panels. But as I move closer, the illusion dissolves into labour. Each line, highlight, and tonal shift has been meticulously applied by hand.

“It’s wired glass,” Nsiah tells me when I ask about the material. “You see the grid? It keeps it from shattering. It can crack, but it won’t fall apart.”

The metaphor lands immediately. Strength does not preclude fracture. It simply resists collapse.

She explains that the glass is the kind used in older louvre windows—“It’s everywhere,” she laughs. “Now that you’ve seen it here, you’ll start to notice.” The ordinary becomes extraordinary under her intervention. Onto this architectural surface, she applies liquid porcelain—imported from the United States—a pigment typically used for decorating plates, mugs, glassware. The black areas are painted with a brush; the whites and greys are squeezed painstakingly from fine-tipped pens.

Up close, the works reveal an almost obsessive precision. Swirls of hair are built strand by strand. Gradients of cheekbone and collarbone are constructed through thousands of deliberate marks. The porcelain behaves like nail polish—thick, pungent, slow to dry. Brushes must be cleaned immediately with acetone. A misstep requires scraping the entire surface with a blade and beginning again.

“Before you even start,” she says, “you have to sit down and think.”

The process is reversed. Unlike canvas, where background precedes subject, Nsiah paints from the front backward. What we see is the result of layers constructed in reverse order. The final gestures are the foundations. Standing behind one of the works, she shows me the back—the so-called “messy” side where paint gathers, where gestures are less controlled.

“It’s like people,” she reflects. “They show you one face. But at the back, there’s all the crazy stuff. That’s the duality I was playing with.”

The exhibition design extends this concept. Nsiah chose the conference room specifically for its reflective capacity. With lights installed overhead and works positioned centrally, the glass catches reflections—of other portraits, of viewers, of windows and sky. The result is a subtle layering: faces overlap, silhouettes merge, viewers become momentarily embedded within the portraits. Beauty becomes multi-dimensional, unstable, refracted.

The arrangement itself forms a quiet choreography. The stands create a circular enclosure—“like women forming a shield,” she explains. Sisterhood is central to the exhibition’s ethos. One large, commanding piece anchors the room, conceived as the core from which the series expanded. Around it, women of varied hairstyles—afros, waves, cornrows, close cuts—assert multiplicity rather than uniformity.

“I wanted to represent as many Black hairstyles as I could,” she says. “So everyone can see themselves.”

This insistence on visibility feels particularly resonant given Nsiah’s own experience within global beauty pageantry. She speaks candidly about participating in Miss Universe and sensing a competitive energy that edged toward toxicity. Pageants, long critiqued for perpetuating narrow and Eurocentric standards of beauty, linger in the background of this exhibition—not as overt protest, but as quiet redirection.

If pageantry stages beauty as competition, Bevy of Beauty stages it as solidarity.

One portrait holds particular emotional weight: her mother, painted from a photograph taken before motherhood. The rendering is distinct—hair outlined rather than filled, the image lighter, almost ethereal. Nsiah confides that her late father had once asked her to paint him, a request she never fulfilled. After his passing, she quickly made this portrait of her mother so she would have something tangible. Regret, memory, devotion—all crystallised in porcelain on glass.

As we circle the works, Nsiah reflects on her evolving concerns. After ten years refining her technical skill, she has been urged to pursue narrative depth—“to marry story to skill.” She is aware of contemporary art’s demand for conceptual framing, for politics, for overt statement. Yet she resists heaviness.

“I want to tell a story,” she says, “but I don’t want it to go too deep.”

In Bevy of Beauty, the story is neither didactic nor polemical. It resides instead in material choice, in gesture, in spatial arrangement. It resides in the tension between fragility and endurance, visibility and concealment, individuality and collective presence.

As I prepare to leave, I notice how the portraits shift depending on where I stand. Move slightly, and reflections alter the image; lean closer, and the grid asserts itself. The wired glass both protects and interrupts the face. It is impossible to look without also seeing structure.

Perhaps that is Nsiah’s quiet proposition: that beauty is never singular, never surface alone. It is scaffolded. It is layered. It holds.

And like wired glass, it may crack—but it does not fall apart.