The MapMaker

The overall goal of this artwork is to foster a pure and ancestral expression, despite traumatic experiences of my people.

For me, language is more than communication. It is a biological algorithm that codes our reality, shapes memory, and guides time. As a Melanated American, I have long questioned the severed lines between my present and ancestral past. Who were my people? What were the names of their lands? What mathematics governed their calendars? My practice investigates these questions through an evolving cosmology of black planetary bodies, multidimensional landscapes, and glyphic abstraction. Working across painting, copper etching, collage, and invented script, I create compositions that channel ancestral memory and speculative futures. My personal geometric alphabet and elemental symbols are tools to rewrite language on my own terms. Collage is both excavation and resistance. Cutting, etching, and layering fragments mimics the paper genocide and cultural displacement inflicted upon my lineage. Yet in this deconstruction, I also reconstruct and navigating the fractal nature of language and reimagining space as sacred ground. Ultimately, my work seeks to compact the distance between micro and macrocosm to map metaphysical and geographic realities of a lost ancestry