In my artistic practice, I am continually influenced by narratives of human perseverance, societal class systems, vulnerability, and power dynamics. I am also interested in collective ancestry and generational memory, unearthing those ancestors and bringing them into this contemporary conversation. In some way, I collaborate with them through my research and artmaking, interpreting their stories. Art-making with history and ancestry is fluid, often with throughlines that are not fully revealed until much later. Nevertheless, I’m tied to this work and always searching for modes of communicating and educating myself and others about the past.
The majority of my work is a series of sculptures I have assembled, reworked, redesigned, and embellished from found objects and other materials that often become part of a larger installation. These structures are visual harvesting of whatever I may be researching. The research often dictates my materials, so remaining open to what comes from the creative ether is vital. It is an ongoing challenge and adventure as I learn to take the back seat to these muses- objects, research, ancestry- and develop a visual language to tell their stories and mine.
Presently I am engaged in research around systems instilled by respectability politics, its adjacency to White Supremacy and colonization, and the duality of its effectiveness in the survival or dismantling of a people. Within this interest, themes emerge that manifest around the unspoken, buried, and erased histories of the Black diaspora, my life as a biracial Black woman, and the systems of oppression foundational to our world and their reverberations throughout generations into modern culture.
