Yvette Nsiah’s Art Has a Side You’ll Never See and That’s the Point

The Accra-based glass artist who paints every piece from the back and means every single thing you see from the front.

The first thing you need to understand about Yvette Nsiah’s work is that you are never seeing it the way it was made.

She paints on the backside of the glass. The chaos, the layering, the millisecond-made mistakes all happen on a surface you’ll never face. Instead, what you get is the front: clean and luminous, with the wire mesh embedded in the panel catching light at angles the paint alone couldn’t reach. “The front is perfect and polished,” she says. “But when you go to the back, it’s really messy.” She’s been thinking about what is shown versus what is true for longer than her glass practice has existed, and she’s no stranger to what a polished surface can hide.

Miss Universe Ghana 2008 will do that to you.

Yvette was born in New York, moved to Ghana at nine, went back to study African studies and education at university, and has been teaching for 20 years. The glass art came the way the best ideas do—not through research or a deliberate pivot, but in a moment that felt closer to divine intervention than decision-making. As a child, Yvette recalls, she had always been obsessed with transparency, light, and rainbows, and the medium made sense when she finally went looking inward for it.

She had stage fright and wanted to be a musician, so she did what any reasonable person would do: entered a national beauty pageant. “Someone who made clothes for Miss Universe, who knew my mother—he called me and said that he thought I would be good for it,” she says. She normally would have said no, but getting in front of crowds was supposed to be the cure, so she said yes instead. She entered and she won, but what she got out of it wasn’t what she went in for—it just happened to be more useful. She went in to practice being seen. She came out understanding what being seen actually does to a person.

“There’s a lot of things I saw there that were very ugly,” she says. “Competition and beauty on the outside versus chaos on the inside.” As her artist statement put it: “the gaze could illuminate—but it could also distort.” It stayed with her, and years later, a different lesson from the same place: “On my art, I’m comfortable,” she says. “But on me, personally? Not so much.”

Glass is not a forgiving medium, and Yvette will be the first to tell you. “It’s a very tedious process,” she says. “Between it being heavy and the fragility—making sure you don’t break it while you’re working with it.” The paint she sources is from the States because nothing available locally holds the way she needs it to, and every panel has to be managed for weight, fragility, and light simultaneously, which is its own form of discipline before you’ve made a single stroke.

Standard glass, she learned early, will shatter. At her Chale Wote debut—the first time she showed her work publicly—the novelty of the medium pulled visitors in close enough to touch, but by the end of the first day, the crowd had handled her work into pieces. Months of process, gone in an afternoon because no one had ever seen anything like it and couldn’t help themselves. She started researching alternatives. The wire-reinforced glass she eventually found changed the terms of her whole practice: “It can crack,” she says, “but it can’t shatter.” The structure holds even when the surface gives.

The first time a piece broke mid-process, nearly finished, she sat on the floor and cried. Once. After that, she found her way to a different relationship with her work, one she traces back to something Nina Simone said: I don’t pick it up, I don’t lay it down. If the work is good, it came through her, not from her. If it isn’t, the same logic applies. Broken pieces go to the back of the studio, not as casualties but as inventory. Someone at an exhibition once told her about a technique of destroying art to recreate it. She hasn’t forgotten that.

Yvette chose a fully glazed room at the Miklin Hotel for Bevy of Beauty and built the lighting setup herself from scratch, positioning each piece individually against its light source until the wire and the liquid porcelain did exactly what she needed. The work doesn’t reflect light so much as translate it. It passes through the glass, catches in the wire, refracts off the porcelain, and comes out the other side as something else. It’s like a conversation about what light does to the things it touches.

Six months. That is the distance between the birth of her son and the death of her father. Two events that, she says, permanently changed how she understands light—not as an element, but as something closer to lineage. “My dad was there, then he wasn’t,” she says. “That thing that we loved so much, that presence that was so warm and loving, was gone.” And her son arrived into that same window of time. A new presence. A new light. “From my dad, to me, to my son, to my son’s child—it’s our light that connects us.”

The pieces in Bevy of Beauty are the largest she has made. They’re close to life-size, with wire grid visible beneath the porcelain, and light moving through them differently depending on where you stand. They fill the room at Miklin Hotel the way people do, but that’s the point. They’re people. 

Specifically, they’re women—painted in monochrome on wire-reinforced glass, each one on an easel so you can walk behind them and see exactly what the front is hiding. Bevy of Beauty is not asking you to admire them. It’s asking you to witness them, the way women rarely get to witness each other outside the performance of beauty. Yvette puts it simply: “Just women uniting, I guess.”

And if you ask Yvette what she wants women to take from any of it, the answer is almost frustratingly simple. Life is short, and it is precious, and most people spend it waiting for permission. “Do what you love,” she says. “Follow your heart.” During her conversation with BLACKSTAR Haus, she shared that she moved to Côte d’Ivoire for four years to teach and learn French, just because she wanted to. She entered a beauty pageant to cure stage fright. She became a glass artist because the idea came to her and she didn’t dismiss it. None of it was planned, but all of it was on purpose.

Perhaps, that too stands as the argument of Bevy of Beauty. Not that women are unbreakable. That they can crack and still hold. And that the mess on the back is what makes the front worth looking at.

Yvette Nsiah is a glass artist and educator based in Accra. Bevy of Beauty: We Don’t Break – We Translate Light is her most recent solo exhibition, held at Miklin Hotel.

Written By: HQ

Photography: Christian Uche

The first thing you need to understand about Yvette Nsiah’s work is that you are never seeing it the way it was made.

She paints on the backside of the glass. The chaos, the layering, the millisecond-made mistakes all happen on a surface you’ll never face. Instead, what you get is the front: clean and luminous, with the wire mesh embedded in the panel catching light at angles the paint alone couldn’t reach. “The front is perfect and polished,” she says. “But when you go to the back, it’s really messy.” She’s been thinking about what is shown versus what is true for longer than her glass practice has existed, and she’s no stranger to what a polished surface can hide.

Miss Universe Ghana 2008 will do that to you.

Yvette was born in New York, moved to Ghana at nine, went back to study African studies and education at university, and has been teaching for 20 years. The glass art came the way the best ideas do—not through research or a deliberate pivot, but in a moment that felt closer to divine intervention than decision-making. As a child, Yvette recalls, she had always been obsessed with transparency, light, and rainbows, and the medium made sense when she finally went looking inward for it.

She had stage fright and wanted to be a musician, so she did what any reasonable person would do: entered a national beauty pageant. “Someone who made clothes for Miss Universe, who knew my mother—he called me and said that he thought I would be good for it,” she says. She normally would have said no, but getting in front of crowds was supposed to be the cure, so she said yes instead. She entered and she won, but what she got out of it wasn’t what she went in for—it just happened to be more useful. She went in to practice being seen. She came out understanding what being seen actually does to a person.

“There’s a lot of things I saw there that were very ugly,” she says. “Competition and beauty on the outside versus chaos on the inside.” As her artist statement put it: “the gaze could illuminate—but it could also distort.” It stayed with her, and years later, a different lesson from the same place: “On my art, I’m comfortable,” she says. “But on me, personally? Not so much.”

Glass is not a forgiving medium, and Yvette will be the first to tell you. “It’s a very tedious process,” she says. “Between it being heavy and the fragility—making sure you don’t break it while you’re working with it.” The paint she sources is from the States because nothing available locally holds the way she needs it to, and every panel has to be managed for weight, fragility, and light simultaneously, which is its own form of discipline before you’ve made a single stroke.

Standard glass, she learned early, will shatter. At her Chale Wote debut—the first time she showed her work publicly—the novelty of the medium pulled visitors in close enough to touch, but by the end of the first day, the crowd had handled her work into pieces. Months of process, gone in an afternoon because no one had ever seen anything like it and couldn’t help themselves. She started researching alternatives. The wire-reinforced glass she eventually found changed the terms of her whole practice: “It can crack,” she says, “but it can’t shatter.” The structure holds even when the surface gives.

The first time a piece broke mid-process, nearly finished, she sat on the floor and cried. Once. After that, she found her way to a different relationship with her work, one she traces back to something Nina Simone said: I don’t pick it up, I don’t lay it down. If the work is good, it came through her, not from her. If it isn’t, the same logic applies. Broken pieces go to the back of the studio, not as casualties but as inventory. Someone at an exhibition once told her about a technique of destroying art to recreate it. She hasn’t forgotten that.

Yvette chose a fully glazed room at the Miklin Hotel for Bevy of Beauty and built the lighting setup herself from scratch, positioning each piece individually against its light source until the wire and the liquid porcelain did exactly what she needed. The work doesn’t reflect light so much as translate it. It passes through the glass, catches in the wire, refracts off the porcelain, and comes out the other side as something else. It’s like a conversation about what light does to the things it touches.

Six months. That is the distance between the birth of her son and the death of her father. Two events that, she says, permanently changed how she understands light—not as an element, but as something closer to lineage. “My dad was there, then he wasn’t,” she says. “That thing that we loved so much, that presence that was so warm and loving, was gone.” And her son arrived into that same window of time. A new presence. A new light. “From my dad, to me, to my son, to my son’s child—it’s our light that connects us.”

The pieces in Bevy of Beauty are the largest she has made. They’re close to life-size, with wire grid visible beneath the porcelain, and light moving through them differently depending on where you stand. They fill the room at Miklin Hotel the way people do, but that’s the point. They’re people. 

Specifically, they’re women—painted in monochrome on wire-reinforced glass, each one on an easel so you can walk behind them and see exactly what the front is hiding. Bevy of Beauty is not asking you to admire them. It’s asking you to witness them, the way women rarely get to witness each other outside the performance of beauty. Yvette puts it simply: “Just women uniting, I guess.”

And if you ask Yvette what she wants women to take from any of it, the answer is almost frustratingly simple. Life is short, and it is precious, and most people spend it waiting for permission. “Do what you love,” she says. “Follow your heart.” During her conversation with BLACKSTAR Haus, she shared that she moved to Côte d’Ivoire for four years to teach and learn French, just because she wanted to. She entered a beauty pageant to cure stage fright. She became a glass artist because the idea came to her and she didn’t dismiss it. None of it was planned, but all of it was on purpose.

Perhaps, that too stands as the argument of Bevy of Beauty. Not that women are unbreakable. That they can crack and still hold. And that the mess on the back is what makes the front worth looking at.

Yvette Nsiah is a glass artist and educator based in Accra. Bevy of Beauty: We Don’t Break – We Translate Light is her most recent solo exhibition, held at Miklin Hotel.

Written By: HQ

Photography: Christian Uche

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