It all started with my grandmother – I believe she is the nexus of my creative inquiry. She taught me how to sew, knit and crochet to channel my energy into something productive. I am the product of divorced parents, so these crafts were the ways I learned to channel my emotions into objects and helped me understand the world as additive or reductive processes. Really, I believe I am a storyteller, my background, before my BFA, was poetry – specifically SLAM poetry. I learned how to utilize word and performance to actualize and understand myself and the identities my body is at war with. I believe these ways of understanding myself and the world find their way into my work and beat at its core.
I am a craft-based artist working in jewelry, sculpture, textiles, book arts, fiber arts, fashion, photography, poetry, performance and installation. I seek to make work that calls the viewer in slowly with its tantalizing beauty and craft until the work reveals itself and its tough underbelly.
My work finds itself at the intersections of Black male masculinity and sexuality in the American imaginary, the systematic consumption of Black bodies from their transport across the globe and how the objects left in their wake become vehicles for myth, ritual and memorial. More specifically, I am interested in the ways people and places leave spiritual residue on the objects they come into contact with and the traces Black bodies, objects and space create, retain and/or reduce value whether it be monetary, cultural or spiritual capital.
Ultimately, the histories of Black bodies in America are commonly erased from textbooks and mythology. To this end, I want to inject new myths and histories into the grey areas and blank pages and imagine new locations and rituals for the Black body to come home to. To do this, I have been drawing on research from Saidiya Hartman, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Michelle M. Wright, Danez Smith and other writers and poets to reimagine the ideas of strangerdom and consumption as a means to understand the past in relation to how we can forge new futures.
My goal as an artist is to initiate an additional moment of confoundment for the viewer as they experience my work. I believe my craft-based objects have a different relationship to the viewer – they are able to engage with the work as utilitarian objects that slowly open, slowly reveal. I work to exploit this relationship between the viewer and object to gently subvert the nature of the object and inject myth and story and the contradictions between them. I believe the slow reveal is a way to reengage with the Black body in a contemporary context due to its stark contrast to the confrontational ways we receive information today. To get to the root of racism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its afterlives, we need to have slow conversations to uncover the ways these all tie into the fabric we call America.
