I am a language-based, multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from reimagining ancestral narratives to investigations of habitual life. Through poems, language-diagrams, and mixed media weavings, I explore how narratives shape and are shaped by cultural norms. My projects attempt to disrupt these norms as a way of disrupting white supremacy, especially relative to family histories and storytelling.
My mixed media works on paper combine language with familiar visual forms that suggest sequences or narratives, like weavings, squares, flow charts, diagrams, maps, rivers and trees. In “Crossroad Series” I build on the history of fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record-keeping, storytelling and poetry. These pieces feature watercolors of ancestral family homes cut into strips and then interwoven with poems about the location and people who lived there. A recent series of sculptures woven from plants found near my home and the studio–like dried iris, lily and daffodil leaves–further explores how weaving with fibers is a kind of narrative and a way of knowing and being in a particular place.
By creating works that emerge from processes and materials exploring storytelling in everyday life, I aim to offer new and strange strategies for material, emotional, intellectual and creative survival. Imbued with a sense of humor and sadness, my work points to the possibility of thriving despite the disembodied, frenetic, neoliberal demand for productivity. While drawing on routines and constraints specific to my life and history, I hope the audience can reflect on the subversive, transformative potential that can emerge from even the most laborious and banal activities of their daily lives.