My work consists of mixed media image-objects that push against notions of essentialist motherhood. I use vernacular technology such as the cell phone photograph or personal digital archive, and remix—through painting, sewing, soft sculpture, and found object assemblage—a spectrum of maternal experiences, and embrace the slippage between the emotive/empirical and analog/digital forms.

 As a member of the Cherokee Nation, my process is a personal expression of the Native American Diaspora. Indigenous peoples were inventive with resources as they were removed from native homelands to new environments. Resourcefulness is instilled in my mind not only from my native ancestry, but also from a rural Kansas upbringing. I myself am a collage of cultures. I react by collaging materials from my ancestors’ contemporary community and personal collaging materials from my ancestors, contemporary community, and personal life experiences.

 My work is currently focused on depicting the shape and character of the sky in a given place. In Detroit, looking out at Lafayette Park, it creates blue crowns around large buildings with open parks surrounding them. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, where I lived prior to my return to Michigan, it was a small triangle of blue seen between tightly packed houses when you looked up past the mountains. At Can Serrat, in El Bruc, Spain, where I worked in residence in 2019, the sky was reflected and fragmented by the dense trees lining the ravine where the residency was located.

 I address the Black maternal mortality and morbidity crisis in America through painting and multimedia. Influenced by my own traumatic pregnancy and survival, the imagery centers the experiences of Black mothers, birthing people, and children who have suffered adverse birth outcomes but challenge the institutional modes in finding solutions. Confronting themes through quiet, often heavy motifs, the environments articulate the imposed health effects disproportionately experienced. All familial perspectives are considered after a tangential birth trauma survival.

 My work explores the psychological relationship we have with mirrors and the questions they pose about image-making, illusion, and our construction of self. My interest began through studying melodrama film, specifically the ways in which reflective surfaces are utilized by directors Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to compress space and illuminate points of personal discovery. What happens when our reflection is false or fabricated? What if our vision of ourselves is not aligned with what we see in the mirror?

 I have spent almost two decades investigating how the perspective of the collective consciousness impacts how we interpret events of great tragedy, political unrest, injustice, violence, beauty, and sublimity. This interpretation is often viewed through the unreliable lens of memory and aesthetic archetypes. Through the use of painting, drawing, building, architecture, design, and making, I strive to discover how my own investigations affect the way I interpret my past, present, and future experiences.

 I’d watch the sugarcane fields, towering above my body, be set ablaze by a fire that expanded until it scorched the crop down to dust and ash. Black clouds billowed overhead while the reaffirming fragrance of gas and diesel signaled the arrival of a new season.

My work explores this cyclical “scorching” that is imperative to regeneration. Buried with charcoal and flooded with turpentine, my canvases capture the plumes of dust that are needed for a new and fertile figure–ground to emerge.

 My paintings are both about intimate, domestic experiences and made from intimate, domestic materials like old sheets, fabric, coffee filters, yarn, and paper. Sometimes my work spills off the panels and into the home or gallery space in which it lives. This merging of art and life interests me as a painter. I want my work to feel as worn and lived in as a comfortable armchair. My color palette is derived from trends in interior design.

 Inspired by positive and negative experiences that come with the foster care system, I was fortunate to find my voice, creative vision, and a connection with the outside world through the remaking of images extracted from photographs.

 I am a guisado, a savory stew with ingredients that are both Nicaragüense and Estadounidense—Nicaraguan and American. As an artist I examine both my struggle with identity and how I came to be who I am today. Being both Nicaragüense and Estadounidense, it is important that my paintings reflect those two worlds and create a new space where people like me can belong. Blending Americana with Latinx, my work gives dignity to the working class while expressing my own longing for acceptance into both worlds from which I feel excluded.