Migrant Mark III, Ezekiel Martey, 2024, mixed media, 24 x 13 x 13 in. / 60.96 x 33.02 x 33.02 cm.

Migration, Memory, and Motion: The Work of Ezekiel Martey

July 8, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Migrant Mark III, Ezekiel Martey, 2024, mixed media, 24 x 13 x 13 in. / 60.96 x 33.02 x 33.02 cm.

Ezekiel Martey’s sculptural practice is rooted in material storytelling, an unflinching look at the bureaucratic, emotional, and spiritual realities of migration.

Ezekiel Martey uses sculpture and mixed media to explore migration, postcolonial tension, and the emotional architectures of waiting and identity.

Through mixed media assemblages incorporating copper, steel, jute, and found materials, Martey composes deeply symbolic forms that bear witness to deferred dreams and stalled processes. His 2024–2025 works, Still Waiting, All That I Said, and Dreams on Hold, each engage with the physical and psychological weight carried by migrants and the systems that fail them.

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Still Waiting, Ezekiel Martey, 2025, mixed media, 5.5 x 17 in. / 13.97 x 43.18 cm.

In Still Waiting, Martey reconfigures the form of a keyboard, embedding copper, resin, and fragments of travel documents between keys, a poetic yet piercing metaphor. The keyboard, an interface for progress and productivity, becomes paralyzed, static. The work mourns how systems designed to facilitate movement often become sites of indefinite pause. The documentation trapped beneath plastic resonates with bureaucratic limbo, while the copper oxidizes slowly, mirroring the corroding hope of the displaced.

All That I Said, Ezekiel Martey, 2025, copper and jute, 97.5 x 23.5 in. / 247.65 x 59.69 cm.

All That I Said drapes a long jute sack from a copper text panel, confronting the viewer with both burden and silence. The Ghana Cocoa Board sack is emblematic of labor, export, and African economic entanglement with the West. It’s a vessel, one meant to carry, but here, it hangs heavy and unresolved. The copper panel above resembles worn script or erased proclamations, a symbolic ledger of promises made and never kept. It speaks to the exhaustion of proving oneself to systems that require endless giving without reciprocity.

Dreams on Hold, Ezekiel Martey, 2024, wheels, steel and kente, 19 x 19 x 25 in. / 48.26 x 48.26 x 63.5 cm.

In Dreams on Hold, two large wheels joined by a steel axle rest on casters, suggesting both motion and stasis. Beads of Kente cloth mark the circumference of each wheel, embedding culture and tradition within the industrial form. This piece reimagines migration as both a cultural inheritance and a physical journey interrupted. The presence of wheels implies potential movement, but their low, collapsed orientation suggests immobility, an arrested dream in object form.

Together, these works form a sculptural triptych on the cost of waiting. Ezekiel Martey doesn’t just reflect the migrant experience, he manifests it through material: keys that won’t type, sacks that won’t lift, wheels that won’t roll. By fusing the symbolic with the tangible, he asks viewers to confront the embodied labor and stalled aspirations that define so many postcolonial migration stories. These are not objects of despair, but of defiance, quiet reminders that even immobility speaks.

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