My Artwork
Familiar Outsider (2024)
Familiar Outsider is a symbol that represents my feelings of dis/connection from African culture as an African American. It takes inspiration from West African art and symbols as well as contemporary jewelry. The result is a form that is divergent from– yet related to– these two aesthetics; a representation of my outsider status with relation to West African culture and still my connection to it as an African American. Even in disconnection, beauty is formed, strange as it may be.
Featured in [queerphoria] vol. 4
Superfluous Comb (2024)
This piece is a celebration of queer transformation through a Black lens. It is inspired by my first time cutting my hair short as a teen – an early assertion of my queerness, though I did not know it the time. Through bright body jewelry, I imagine what it would have looked like for this act to have been celebrated as a rite of passage by drawing on my own ancestral connection. A brass abstract comb design, inspired by Mangbetu hair pins, is the center of the work. Spiraled hemp & beads serve to make the work into wearable art.
Featured in SNAG IN Focus 2024
Black as in Queer as in Black (2023)
This necklace is an intersectional exploration of the queer connection of Black and LGBTQ+ communities – neither conform to the ideals of White heteronormative society.
Featured in [queerphoria] vol. 2
Reminder (2023)
Reminder honors the survival of my ancestors and represents my dis/connection to them. Legacies of enslavement and resulting trauma and lasting discrimination have frayed my connection to my ancestors. Abstract chain-like forms are a reference to the enslavement of my ancestors and the struggle of existing in the United States. A single teardrop-shaped garnet evokes blood, a symbol of kinship. The act of making a chain out of these discrete pieces was a practice in connecting disconnected generations.
Inspired by costume jewelry, this shining brass piece evokes beauty and adornment. The piece is designed to be functional, although the sharp edges on the chain cause discomfort to the wearer – evoking how it feels to me to be a Black person in America. Reminder encapsulates the complicated interconnected and sometimes contradictory feelings of pride, legacy, pain, kinship, and survival.