Artist Statement
I create mixed-media and textile art addressing contemporary American life through the lens of my own experience, rooted in visual elements of my ancestral heritage. Using asymmetry, geometric design, earth tones, human figures, oversized faces, and ornate textural embellishment, my work merges tradition and observation, creating a visual metaphor for the organized chaos of the current world.
I focus on the act of making a mark, preserving a record of the here and now, with a special focus on transient, unseen, and marginalized perspectives. My large-scale quilts and paper collages pay tribute to the longstanding practice of sewing together disparate scraps to form a cohesive whole—a quilting tradition present in both West African and modern African-American communities.
My artwork tells stories: preserving the rusted outlines of industrial farming equipment, repurposing abstract photographic shapes in paint designs, and presenting large-scale Black human faces as fabric patterns. I manipulate fabric and paper ephemera via rust dying, discharge dying, screen printing, and painting on large swaths, then later tear, re-sew, and arrange the pieces, along with painted imagery and found objects, into giant pictorial configurations. With a jazz sensibility and a geometric foundation informing the composition process, my work balances structure with freedom. Idiosyncratic and familiar imagery is arranged with hieroglyphic care, reflecting the chaotic, improvisational music of densely populated cities: the many faces seen in a flash, the snippet of conversation overheard on a crowded street, the people who come and go endlessly, and the question of what that quick turnaround means.