Flying Birds, 2023
My great grandmother was a farmer and a quilter. Like many African diasporic quilters from Alabama, she used the materials at hand –- old work clothes, fragments of Sunday dresses, and used fabrics –- to create cover for her children: a practice of both expression and survival. Situated within my experience of dualities as a biracial black Nebraskan, the patchwork becomes a primary form holding the simultaneity of subject positions, perspectives and histories collapsing within the material and image space of the artwork. Through painting, quilting and bricolage I evoke the animate histories of inanimate objects: engaging with the actualities of commodity culture and its relationship to racial and environmental harm. Starting from personal and historical research – alongside secondhand art supplies and futureless objects - my process metabolizes peripheral subjectivities and waste to reclaim their futurity.