ARTIST STATEMENT
my work exists in honor of my ancestors, to keep them alive in my existence. remembrance and reverence are the seeds I plant, the seeds of change that manifest through time. harmony is my harvest, I follow the tradition of my ancestors that places me in harmonious gratitude with the land, nature, the earth, and all that is in it. My work is a ritual, a journey to becoming. My process is an intimate worship of my lineage, and a connection to a larger cosmos of knowingness of this world and all of the energies hidden and unseen that catalyze this existence, ÀṢẸ. As my vessel carries the harvest fruits of change, my work becomes the space where ancestral transformation and healing occur. This practice is my truest devotion to my ancestors, the past, myself, and the present. It is my devotion to time, actualized as a tangible change for the future unborn.
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ON ANCESTRAL VENERATION
My work is an earnest commune with my ancestors, with our collective ancestors whose shoulders we stand on, bridging the past to the present and rekindling the imagination and visualization of a future that embodies the spirit of FREEDOM. I am here to use my hands, eyes, legs, voice, and every facet of my infinite being to fulfill my ancestral responsibility and ensure that my ancestors do not die within me. My work is an ancestral devotion to everything that has come before me- an intimate and limitless connection to this reality that recontextualizes time as divine knowingness of all that is to exist. Each creation is a love letter to all African people across the diaspora - memorializing and honoring our heritage, resilience, cultural diversity, and expressions throughout history.
AFROABSTRACTURE
Working in painting, soft sculpture, cyanotype prints, photographs, installations, audio-visual media, and performance art, my transdisciplinary artistic practice is a spiritual and energetic reconnection to the DIVINE within and around us, following in the Yorùbá philosophy of limitless divine energy potential, ÀṢẸ. Through this energetically conscious practice, my work endeavors to scrutinize, deconstruct, and redefine the existential and paradoxical question of what it means to be a “Contemporary African", echoing a re-examination of consciousness and existentialism grounded in African knowledge systems, cultural and spiritual practices, philosophies, and traditions.
This transdisciplinary practice employs a philosophy I have coined as "AFRO-ABSTRACTURE." The conceptualization of this philosophy is channeled through the energetic intuitive exploration of the work informed by an Afrocentric consideration for materiality, color, sound, texture, rhythm, mark-making, layering, and pattern-making in all of my working disciplines. This creative language is characterized by exploring and transforming spiritual energy saturated in both the material and the metaphysical. By activating the physical and conceptual embodiments of Yorùbá oral & cultural tradition, spiritual practices, African fabrics & textiles, wood figurines, masks, and other objects of cultural significance, my work reveres how the past is alive in the present, mindfully and intimately honoring my ancestors and their contributions that continue to inform and shape contemporary expressions and experiences.
Through this meticulous research-oriented practice, my work also serves as a contemporary conduit for preserving and granting benevolence to my Yoruba and African cultural heritage.
