ARTIST STATEMENT
For over two decades, my voice lived through dance alone. Now, having transformed, I move through an interdisciplinary practice with movement and form as its foundation.
My work spans photography, video, text, textiles, sculpture, and healing practices, each offering a means of tending to the severed Black psyche. This work is rooted in mythology, folklore, fairytales, and Afro-futurist thought, tools I use to examine and subvert racial and gender inequities.
At the center is Tar Baby Code, a body-based font I developed from the African-American folk tale of Br’er Rabbit—the trickster who escapes the trap. This font reclaims the expressive force of the Black female figure, rendering her visible in a system designed to erase her. In this code, resistance lives in literacy, form, and flesh. Whether in statements of protest, praise, or prayer, Tar Baby Code turns the body into text, and text into a site of refusal.
My source material ranges from Egyptian and medieval European mythology to African-American folklore and photographs from the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. These fragments form a present that is both haunted and futuristic—a portal through which time bends, revealing pasts and futures simultaneously.
This portal is what I call a wormhole—a metaphor for slipping through space-time, and for resistance itself.
I invite you to enter. The price of admission is reflection. You may encounter tear and suture, dismemberment and reconstitution, death and resurrection. The reward is not comfort, but a redemptive balm—one you carry with you.
For more Check Out this interview with The Kenan Institute for the Arts (UNCSA):