Artist Statement

My work is an ongoing dialogue between the past, present, and future, centered on honoring self-representation, family legacy, and the resilience of Black identity.  I create assemblage collages, sculptural forms, and ceramic bodily works. Using found objects and materials that carry traces of lived experiences to display curated memories. These fragments—old photographs, textiles, ceramics, and everyday artifacts—form a material language through which I explore memory, personal history, and cultural traditions.

Family, in all its complexities, is the heart of my creative practice. Each piece serves as an archive of intimate stories evoking the textures of lived experiences. Central to my research is the concept of memory—how it is preserved, interpreted, and remade over time. Drawing from my family’s heritage, particularly the quilting traditions of my great grandmother, I integrate photo repetition, material layering, and quilting techniques to recontextualize personal and collective histories.

I engage with materials that carry personal and communal significance. Found materials, fabric, and ceramic forms are layered and repeated, much like the photo transfer process, to create compositions that are both intimate and expansive. Materials become vessels of memory, infused with the tension between what is preserved and what is lost. In my work, objects carry meaning beyond their form. The act of making—cutting, layering, searching, mixing, boiling, stitching, firing—becomes a process of repair and reclamation, an homage to resilience and continuity within the African American experience.

My work is an act of preservation and transformation—a way of reassembling fragments of the past into a dynamic, living legacy. The repetition of images and textures, alongside the tactile intimacy of material culture, allows me to reimagine what is often lost or overlooked, creating new spaces for reflection and dialogue.

My practice is an act of reflecting, remembering and reconstructing, grounded in the material process and material culture to re-center personal narratives. In crafting these visual and material narratives, I seek to not only preserve my family’s legacy but also offer a space where viewers can connect to their own histories and imagine new futures. Through my evolving practice, I aim to inspire the power of reflection on one’s family heritage and the ways material culture shape’s identity and belonging.