As a disabled Black woman, I have a desire for people to accept or appreciate me for both my surface and what’s below it; to humanize me not because of my appearance, but despite it. My paintings channel the complexity of my identity. I create a surface of works that are richly layered, both demanding attention and refusing any simple legibility.

My anthropomorphic figures are a way for me to visualize my own body. Their irregular extremities are intended to express a state of atrophy. I render them joyful and beautiful. Ambivalence is a core theme in my work; these figures exist on the border of abstraction and representation. I’m interested in the evocation of nostalgia for girlhood, while also imagining possible futures. Neither utopian nor dystopian, I instead produce bodies that refuse to be contained.