I am a process-based, interdisciplinary visual artist who engages both expired and unexpired instant, medium format, 8mm, and 16mm film, as well as digital video methods to document my experimental instant film processes which form the bulk of my work. I place emphasis on utilizing Polaroids due to their ubiquitous nature and their integral capabilities of incorporating timing and receiving layers to automatically develop and fix the photo without any intervention from the photographer. 

In reverence to and remembrance of my rootworking and field-laboring ancestors, I utilize nature and natural elements as my tools to make the intangible, tangible. I am most frequently drawn to water, which serves as both a conduit and catalyst for ritual and repetitive change. As necessary, I incorporate materials such as silk prints, found ephemera of respective environments, mantras, poems, etc., to add context and extension to the visual depictions of my discoveries. In the vein of Zora Neale Hurston and other purveyors of Black feminist thought, I am inspired to provide perspectives and explorations that center Blackness both on this side of the Atlantic and the larger Global South with an emphasis on an accurate representation of Black life both current and ancestral. 

My current practice places process at the forefront of my work — the timeframe, environment, and matter that the Polaroid are exposed to and placed in are equally as integral as the finished result. I am seeking a formalized methodology, as I create what is essentially becoming my own development process for my Polaroids. My goal is to eventually have my resulting images be less spontaneous and more intentional through repetitive engagements of my process. By removing some, but not all of the spontaneity through the repetition of time based experimentation, I can have a more accurate depiction of the response factor of the call and response I see myself doing with nature in varying environments. 

Just as Mark Stirner’s egoism argued that individuals are impossible to fully comprehend, I contend with the notion that the earth itself is impossible to fully comprehend. As noted by John McPhee in Annals of the Former World, “the human mind may not have evolved to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.” I engage in time based explorations not to comprehend the totality of time or the temporality of environments, but to expose and archive the visual messaging that emanates from a place. I am particularly interested in sites of ecological and racialized violence, as these are places that also evidence radical modes of survival, and, where and when possible, radical healing. 

My recent work is also heavily influenced by the genealogical research I have been doing for the past 15 years. With an initial goal of tracing my matrilineal line back to the last enslaved ancestor in Barbados, I incorporated my patrilineal line after failing to get past 1911. I was able to trace back to 1850, and generations of ancestors who are to this day directly tied to Drax Hall Plantation, the first sugarcane plantation in the Western Hemisphere. This discovery has increased my inquisitiveness regarding ontological and epistemological evidence. As I remain situated in an ebb and flow between America and Barbados, I consider what it means to belong and not belong. My work questions and examines birthright, lineage, modes of communication, trauma responses, and bearing witness.