Artist Statement

My work examines how reverence, rest, adornment, and connection to nature can operate as practices of survival, restoration, and collective care. Through paintings of still lifes, landscapes, interior spaces, and figures, I explore mental, emotional, and spiritual healing through a Black feminist lens. Grounded in womanist, naturalist, and decolonial frameworks, my practice situates painting within lineages of feminist resistance, radical imagination, and beauty-making as political, spiritual, and communal labor, where care itself becomes a form of refusal and endurance.

Working primarily in oil paint, I build compositions that inhabit a threshold space between the material and immaterial—dreams, memory, meditation, intuition, ancestry, and spiritual reflection—where transformation unfolds through self-authored ritual rather than fixed narrative. Objects, bodies, and environments function as both physical presence and psychic residue.

I construct a recurring visual language through symbolic forms that carry layered meaning. Vessels such as vases, bowls, and containers function as metaphors for the body—structures of emotional architecture. Delicate materials, including sheer textiles, plush fabrics, and glass, evoke tenderness and vulnerability. Adornment objects—perfume bottles, jewelry, beads, combs, mirrors—reference ritualized beauty, self-making, pleasure, and sacred presentation. Ritual materials such as shells, crystals, incense, sage, and stones speak to grounding, ancestral presence, cleansing, and transformation. Celestial elements—moons, stars, and planetary light—gesture toward expansiveness, mystery, and interconnected systems, while flora and organic growth suggest cyclical time, regeneration, and return.

Nature functions as both subject and framework within my practice, where its rhythms, cycles, and patterns become a mirror for navigating internal terrain. Informed by traditions of altar-making, spirituality, herbalism, ancestral reverence, and adornment, I construct still life compositions as devotional spaces where everyday objects are charged with the symbolic weight of personal and cultural identity and spiritual resonance.

My figurative work extends these concerns through anonymous or partially obscured Black female figures that resist fixed identity and that operate as sites of projection, softness, and introspection. I challenge histories that have overdetermined Black women through visibility, labor, and objectification. Instead, I insist on Black femininity as expansive, sacred, emotionally complex, and self-determined—capable of holding interior worlds that exceed imposed frames.

Ultimately, my paintings propose care as both material and metaphysical practice, asking what it means to slow perception, return attention to the body, and imagine healing as an ongoing, collective process of becoming.