Falling Ancestor

I see my work as part of a canon of Black women artists, scholars, and activists, concerned with social justice, cultural reclamation, and freedom. In my interdisciplinary research, I bring encaustic, assemblage, and installation into conversation with clown, movement, and voice. Reflective of a creative practice that merges with ceremonial practice, my work brings about an integration of the material with the ethereal. In my Middle Passage memory work, I reimagine the poetics of memorialization. Grounded in the reparative labour of gathering and assembling, my work contemplates fragmentation while gesturing toward wholeness. Employing hybrid Yoruba, Adinkra, and Vodou iconographies, I perform activations of my current installation work, Bones | Meditations on Middle Passage Memory, and invite Black community members to participate, exploring what I call a collective, embodied, mourning praxis. As an arts educator, I have developed a pedagogy that seeks to foster African cultural literacy, cultivate Black agency, and nurture Black self-love. As an initiated sacred leader, I curate spaces for Black healing, participate in ceremony, and mentor Black youth. As an editor, I work with authors of the African diaspora, engaging their work through a decolonial, feminist lens.