Across many societies, including Ghana, menstruation remains a subject shrouded in silence, myth, and shame. Often considered impure or taboo, menstruating women and girls may be excluded from communal life, denied access to religious spaces, cooking duties, or even social participation. In many cases, such stigma leads to isolation, misinformation, and internalized shame that lasts well beyond adolescence.
This exhibition by Samuella confronts these inherited beliefs through abstraction, fragmentation, and unapologetic visibility. Samuella’s abstract compositions, rendered in hues of red paint, become a visceral language, evoking both the physicality of menstruation and the emotional weight it carries.
A recurring technique in the works, which is pixelation, is not merely aesthetic but rather suggests distortion, censorship, and partial visibility as a result of Samuella’s condition being Myopic, which also echoes the fragmented understanding of menstruation shaped by cultural silence.
The color red is central, not only as a reference to blood, but as a declaration of life, rhythm, and the undeniable presence of the female body. In these works, red flows, seeps, pulses, and interrupts, insisting that menstruation be seen, acknowledged, and respected.
In Ghana, as in many parts of the world, menstruation myths continue to affect daily life. From young girls missing school due to a lack of sanitary products, to women being discouraged from participating in religious rituals or public leadership while on their period, the social cost of menstrual stigma is real. But slowly, that narrative is shifting through education, advocacy, and now, art.
Within the exhibition, Samuella creates flowers made with pads, tampons in a red coloured pot that highlights the products used during menstruation, and thrifted white panties stained with red dye, hung up where no one can look away.
Samuella chose to use oborɔni wawu (second-hand) underwear for a reason. These garments have lived other lives; they’ve been worn, stretched, and carry their own private stories
This exhibition invites viewers to reflect deeply:
What have we been taught to believe about menstruation?
Who benefits from that silence?
And what becomes possible when we choose to speak, paint, and bleed in truth?
Through this body of work, the artist does not offer solutions, but a space: a space to see menstruation not as shameful or hidden, but as elemental, a natural cycle that carries its own dignity, its own power.
Samuella Graham, professionally known as Samo, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Accra, Ghana.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Design from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (2019) and works as a creative director in advertising while maintaining an active fine arts practice.
Graham’s distinctive pixelated painting technique combines her graphic design background with her personal visual experience shaped by myopia.
Her work has been exhibited at Windsor Gallery in Lagos (2024), AZZ-Art in Abidjan (2023), and various venues in Accra. She contributed to an ancestral project at the Nkyinkyim Museum, Ghana, in 2022.
Most recently, Graham concluded a residency program at Worldfaze Art Practice, where she created a body of work that speaks about menstruation, further establishing her commitment to addressing important social issues through contemporary art.

Her First Time I
POP Acrylic paint, Red Dye and Canvas fabric 33cm x 33cm

Her First Time II
POP Acrylic paint, Red Dye and Canvas fabric 33cm x 33cm

Her First Time X
POP Acrylic paint, Red Dye and Canvas fabric 33cm x 33cm

Respect! Her Vagina
Acrylic and POP on canvas 87cm x 106cm

Her Red Palm
Acrylic and POP on canvas 94cm x 94cm

Oops, I Sneezed
Acrylic and POP on canvas 94cm x 94cm