My work engages with experiences of liminality through the complicated generational materiality negotiated by black female embodiment. The fragmentation of family, as generations evaporate and regenerate into new black bodies has driven me to representing the black figure in a tenuous two-dimensional world that displays the contingent fragility of their existence. 

Through my process, a complicated temporal negotiation occurs between remembering history through the body, while situating the body as a speculative prototype for a future yet to come. The result is an uncanny hauntology, marked by complexities to identity that linger around the history of the black body as subject and object, resulting in a fleshy alchemy of hopes, anxieties, aspirations, memory, and memorial, attempting to escape a past that nonetheless remains hauntingly present as my ancestors speak to me.   In exploring these ideas, I position figures in peculiar settings that seem familiar, their actions conducted in a dream-like atmosphere filled with vibrant intensity. Comparing the scale of the self-portraits and neighboring symbolic objects allows for themes of the surreal to come forward in productively ambiguous ways. Tightly rendered areas representing the validity of the present as I make my way through it, trace the objectified representation of what the self knows as real and is contrasted by loosely, gestural depictions of the vague, haunting essence of the past, a distant memory. The abstraction of the body is my gateway to understanding the self as an object, and, simultaneously, the self as beyond objectifiable. 

The lessons gleaned from family and generational trauma are the keys to my artistic practice and will therefore be the keys to my future endeavors regarding painting. The question of what my history looked like will allow me to create a bridge between past and present, answering the question as to what came before me and how it allows me to draw conclusions about my identity.