artist statement

My work explores Black presence within contact zones across the diaspora. Drawing on the idea of the “contact zone,” a term developed by Mary Louise Pratt to describe spaces where cultures meet and shape one another, I am interested in the layered places where Black people encounter each other across geography, history, and inherited memory. Through painting, photography, textiles, and sculptural interface, I create surfaces and structures that hold these encounters.

My mixed media paintings center Black figures in states of being rather than performance. I am interested in the quiet power of the everyday, the pleasure of mundanity. Sitting, resting, looking, gathering. Moments where Black life exists without explanation or spectacle. I build these images through layered materials such as acrylic, collage, drafting film, text, and structural markings that reference architecture, mapping, and institutional systems. Within these frameworks, the figures remain sovereign.

Photography allows me to extend this attention to lived space. I use the camera to witness ordinary moments of Black life across diasporic contexts. I am drawn to gesture, proximity, and environment, the small exchanges and everyday intimacies that form the texture of collective life.

Textiles bring another dimension to this exploration. Cloth carries histories of migration, trade, labor, and inheritance. Through stitching, layering, and material juxtaposition, I engage the tactile memory embedded in fabric. Textiles function as soft archives, holding memory differently than rigid structures do.

My sculptural interface works approach memory from another direction. Using aluminum face plates, directional pads, labeled buttons, and drafting materials, I build systems that viewers must physically navigate. These pieces borrow the visual language of authority and control, but interaction reveals something more fluid. Memory shifts. Meaning changes through movement.

Across these mediums, I am interested in how Black identity moves within and across systems. The contact zones in my work are not only sites of tension. They are also spaces of relation, translation, intimacy, survival, and quiet joy.

I create work where Black presence does not ask for permission. It simply exists.