In my spare time I am a self taught photographer, and have fallen in love with film photography.
I started taking photos as a way of better understanding the images and subjects I was writing about for my PhD in American Culture, but as March 2020 turned our worlds upside down, digital and film photography became a way for me to explore my city and myself safely and creatively. I love street photography and self portraiture. I love capturing glimpses of my friends in their truest selves. I have always been what Kellie Jones calls “eyeminded,” and enjoy the feeling of staring outward and inward as the moment allows.
Using this foundation, my art practice encourages a tactile, textural relationship with 35mm film photography. Treating glossy, reflective film prints like mosaic tiles, my photo collages work to abstract portrait and landscape images of home. While not explicitly depicted in my source images, the images that compose these collages are tied to mothers, what Patricia Hill Collins calls “other mothers,” and matrilineal relationships with nature. As a researcher of 20th-century black and mixed-race family portraiture, I have always been drawn to how domestic intimacies can be represented beyond the body and onto material culture - in the circulation of heirloom objects, land, and photo albums. This new photo collage series looks to my personal and familial connection to plants and bodies of water that mediate my relationship to home and family. Abstracted through collage, these scenes are
Simultaneously aloof and alluring. While “Unmothered” (2024) identifies the spaces that we open ourselves to when self-soothing, dissociating, and/or healing, “Other Mothers” (2024) ties the maternal to plants and flowers that hold positive meaning in my life. Here, an image of my mother’s favorite cone flowers anchor the piece, and an image of the fig tree that lives in my home in DC reminds me of the plants that root me to new home spaces of my own making.
Please inquire regarding prints, commissions, or collaborations.
