About

My work navigates the entangled histories of labor, resistance, and memory by engaging directly with the industrial Jacquard loom—a machine rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and enslavement. This loom, once used to clothe and commodify my ancestors, is now a central tool in my practice—not to replicate its violent past and present, but to reclaim it. My work questions what it means to both challenge and work within a system that was never made for us, yet one that we have always shaped through survival, culture, and creativity.

I ask: What does it mean to be complicit with, or to reject, the histories embedded in the loom’s design and function? How can I disrupt its legacy as a colonial algorithm and instead use it as a site of Black expression, resistance, and presence?

Through drawing, weaving, layering, and embellishing, I create spaces that hold the contradictions of trauma and joy, history and possibility. Materials like cotton, wool, linen, beads, charcoal, pastels carry ancestral weight. These are some of the materials my family has touched, cultivated, and survived through. The cloth becomes a site of reimagining—a garden of memory and becoming. Often, after weaving, I draw, collage, or stitch over the surface, allowing the fabric to evolve into a living archive. These gestures help me process moments of grief, hope, and connection.

At the center of my practice is an exploration of Black womanhood through the feeling of emotions, the expression of bodily autonomy, and the navigation of relationships and culture. At times, I feel deeply connected to the Jacquard loom itself. Like the machine, Black women are often expected to perform endlessly—to produce, carry, and move for the benefit of others. The loom and I collaborate, but we also conflict. We are made of different forms of data: one mechanical and programmed, the other embodied and lived. Yet both of us are measured by output. I think about what it means to infuse intentionality, softness, and love back into this machine. How can care exist within systems designed for extraction? How can slowness, touch, and refusal interrupt automation?

Textile traditions such as Ghanaian Kente cloth, Southern Black-American quilts, and Haitian Drapo Vodou connect me to Black Diasporic knowledge systems that center pleasure and resist erasure. Similarly, the visual and conceptual strategies of artists like Emory Douglas, Faith Ringgold, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems ground me in a lineage of storytelling that celebrates Black life while confronting its fragility.

Repetition—of thread, of shape, of action—is central to my process. It mirrors the cyclical nature of uncovering and reckoning. Each mark or weave is a tactile response to life. Ultimately, my practice is a way of making-sensible: to keep finding ways to feel, remember, and respond through touch, form, and pattern.