The notion of home is something that most of us take for granted-yet, it is fragile. A majority of us are one financial crisis away from losing housing. My work bears witness to the ghostly remnants of homes that Americans have been forced to abandon. With documentary photography, drawing materials and paint, I illuminate the disuse of foreclosed properties. Approaching this process through visual and physical collection, I call attention to the absence and the intimate roles of previous tenants. Created with one sole purpose- this body of work aims to provide awareness of the forgotten; the foreclosed.

I am examining ways of understanding myself through objects by focusing on giving form to invisible embodiments of states like emotions, memories, and experiences. This allows me to explore the circumstances surrounding me and ask: Where do I get inspiration from? What do I hear and feel? How do I process the memories of everything I have been through? Exploring these unshaped things in my studio work allows me to give form to my accumulated experience over time. This work synthesizes and catalogs my relationship with myself through the objectification of invisible things.

Depictions of ceramic objects in European and American oil paintings are appropriated onto porcelain forms that look like stretched canvases. I explore the relationship between east and west through re-interpretation of western artifacts based on my own projection without permission. Collectively, they are an obnoxious attempt to insert my identity into a history that had already identified and fetishized “me”. My identity retold in sculptural forms are grand, inflated, boastful, and full of insecurity.

I explore the role of wonder and beauty in our search for knowledge, comfort, and security. Through optically rich material manipulations I fabricate objects of wonder and inquiry that regard the nature of truth and perception, and question established routes to understanding.

In my work, I am using the images of the city and windows. Viewers can read the reflected images of fragility and disconnection in my work. The window is a sign of human emotions. How can I make the viewer feel that we are disconnected and fragile? I think the windows and cities can be signifiers and mirror all emotions.

In the Caribbean, the Jumbie is a mischievous, mythical, ghost-like creature known for possession and other physical disturbances. Thought to be the souls of someone who has lived a violent life or died a violent death, practices such as exorcisms and prayer are performed in hopes of capturing and banishing these presences from their victims’ lives. The Jumbie's goal is not to harm or kill but to cause mischief and mayhem. Ever since I moved to the United States of America for college from the Caribbean, I have noticed a decline in my mental health. In my culture people reacted to mental health the same way they responded to the Jumbie, as a demonic possession that, according to them, could only be fixed through prayer. Once I became aware of that comparison, I began working on A Jumbie Quilt and Are You Seeing Jumbie, a children’s book that follows a girl, who discovers she has a Jumbie and takes account of how she moves forward with learning to live with it. In both of these projects, I use photography, digital collage, and fabric to explore what it means to preserve a hybrid identity while recounting the impact living in another country has had on my mental health. The quilt and the book serve as documentation of my relationship with the Jumbie and how we have grown from being strangers to becoming familiar with one another, I wish to create a dissonance that mimics the turmoil I feel as a person caught in between cultures and grasping for solace while battling an unknown foe.

Ceramic objects explore play, communication, and our relationships in the world. The work presents opportunities of interaction through enclosed spaces that incite moments of connection. Combining a visual dialogue of tubes, playground equipment, and gardens, abstract pieces are constructed in order to be completed through the interjection of the body. The work is not done until someone uses it, imbuing the objects with functionality. Scream, laugh, yell, whisper secrets to another; these objects present a fictional world that invites you to be curious and examine how you move through your surroundings.

Vulnerability, resilience, and empathy are emotional states that are displayed in the action of creating my work as well as the outcome of the sculptures throughout time. My work is ephemeral, as it changes, the material’s vulnerability is revealed. In my metal, cyanotype, and video performances there is a focus on everyday actions, the ‘gaze’, as well as movements and gestures related to dance. By researching performance and dance history, I make connections on how specific events influence performances and how personal emotions eventually factor into the art form. As part of my practice, I imprint my body onto a sheet of steel with coconut oil and use a torch and vinegar solution to rust the bare steel. The female body emerges and appears distorted to the viewer by the ephemeral qualities of oxidation on metal. People don't often associate metal to be vulnerable or rust to be beautiful. However, in my metal works, rusting steel is a beautiful medium to visualize emergence and growth. Through the process of making and watching my work change throughout time, I find the personal connection of watching my pieces grow and change while my mind and body are going through a similar process.

In my thesis exhibition, Hitting the Nail on The Head, my sculptural works examine how the ethics and morality of American society are shaped through our words. The idioms and sayings in the United States’ lexicon have a direct correlation to the development of our thoughts, actions, and understanding of the world and its citizens. Through my sculptures, I task the viewer with examining their use of common phrases like, “When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do”, and if it excuses insult based on lack of understanding with images of Hollywood icons ignorantly appropriating various elements of Black culture in America, in the form of postcards. In my video, “One Bad Apple Spoils the Barrel”, I present the viewer with categorical evidence that the commonly used alternative phrasing they have been hearing on television following tragic events, is an inversion of the truth with decomposing apples displayed in a time-lapse video. In my monument, “Thoughts & Prayers”, I confront the viewer with an assault rifle mounted to a mountain of 27 children’s bookbags covered in the candle wax to challenge the the 2nd amendment and what the years of political inaction has cost us in innocent lives.

I am Wolf Clan, from the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, a member of the Iroquois Confederacy. I often consider the things we pass down between generations. I grew up learning Iroquois craft techniques from my mother, aunts, and grandparents. I look at my hands when I am working with corn using traditional techniques and think about how they are the result of women’s hands working in the same way over many, many generations. Working with corn husk and corn products ties me to my lineage and it allows for a meditative state that creates space for me to consider my humanness and my connectedness to the past and the future. It represents knowledge about life and healing sent through time from my ancestral mothers. While working I reflect on the lives of my matrilineal ancestors, who they were and the challenges they faced. It is comforting and empowering to know my own life is proof of their ability to persevere through extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I gain strength and healing from acknowledging their presence in me and my life.