About

When I create, it is an attempt at my emotional release. Working with weaving, drawing, collage, and printmedia, I try to work out the complexities of my everyday emotions and Black identity. Drawing and weaving give me the opportunity to create a foundation of imagery that I’m then able to build on. Layering with different mediums allows me to reflect upon and confront certain feelings ... expectations, memories of feeling inadequate, angry, sad, joyous, proud, resilient. Some feelings are the ones that I don’t want to tell many people because I feel like I’m supposed to be strong and take life in stride.

Artists like Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, illustrate the strength, beauty and resilience of the human condition and their communities as well as the pain and suffering during wars, depressions, and migrations. Because my family has lived through past pain, trauma, and labor, I feel like I can continue to do the same and I feel lucky that my work is a labor that I have the choice and freedom to do. Doing the work sets aside time to notice repetitive feelings and respond with new modes of making-sensible (Christina Sharpe). Marks, threads, multiple pieces assembled together create meaning and representation of how I feel after a stressful conversation, after a racist comment, after watching my friends walk in a Black Lives Matter demonstration, after hearing my grandmother’s voice on the phone. 

Torkwase Dyson describes the marks in a series of drawings that she made as “the shapes that make the black” to reference “moments in history as self emancipation… as I’m making, as I’m drawing, as I’m painting, these are the shapes that made them. These are the shapes that make me…Shapes as Black compositional thought. How do we move our bodies toward liberation, toward emancipatory action?” The process of physically making marks, prints, and fabrics carry an essence and weight that is a part of my being. Shapes created reflect patterns of my experience, resistance, and freedom.