Artist Statement

I construct visual and emotional spaces where diasporic narratives of loss and beauty reside. Iterations of installations, performances, drawings, and writings become a collection of autobiographical abstraction and figurative storytelling. In the menial labor of accumulating and transforming materials, I ask myself what holds us together; stories, yearnings, rituals, and spirituality.

Iterative articulations of diasporic narratives and contextualizing grief in the American South continue to be places of investigation and confrontation in recent years. It is a grief that is yet to be fully formed or understood by siloed communities of immigrants and migrants, this intergenerational grief seeded by the Western violence of displacement and alienation.

My compositional craft and strategic aesthetics in abstraction allows the public to have multiple entry points to register this landscape, a repository where the grief resides. After a decade of commiting my practice to hand-shredding silk flowers, I am now accumulating teardrop shaped hand-blown glass vessels to hold respective local river water to embody this need to formulate lyricism as we grieve. These material and aesthetic choices inform my scholarship, placing what once was an intimate, insular autobiographical narrative into a culturally emergent and relevant framework in how we understand American history and its violent impact. 

I am intrigued by the constant movement of the river and how it is teaching me a choreography of grief while generating life. In my childhood memories, rivers were sites of mourning, washing, and rejoicing. In the larger context, rivers hold ecological memories of abundance, eradication, borders, and power.