An heirloom rocking chair in need of restoration was my inspiration to learn to cane, which evolved into an ongoing series of paintings and mixed media works investigating the forms and textures of chairs and interior spaces. Drawers and boxes in my studio overflow with scraps collected for the past twenty years—treasured family photos, heirloom embroidery, pieces of chair upholstery, vintage drawer liners, richly colored and textured textiles, stacks of children’s drawings—bits and pieces of stories and nostalgia, a collection of a lifetime.

 Recently I have been painting bodies and hands. And these questions keep coming up: How does a painting function as a surrogate for a body? Can a painting reach a level of intimacy and touch, as bodies can? And can imagery that toggles between states of visibility speak to those who are themselves caught between two worlds?

 My work involves overlapping combinations of media. Photo transfer and paint are combined with clay, and photographs are transferred, screenprinted, or collaged into paintings. I welcome the expressive possibilities of not limiting myself to a single medium. As well, I work loosely to encourage unplanned, intuitive outcomes. Nature for me is a frequent source of imagery, lessons, and metaphors. A recurrent theme in my work is the memento mori.

 My current work explores my life experiences as contained in objects collected, moments remembered in form, and shapes organized onto the painting surface. Currently, my practice looks like anthropological dig meets cabinet of curiosities. I draw from objects in my home—pots made by friends, a handful of sand I collected while visiting my sister in Kuwait, a cast of my dad’s teeth, my grandmother’s seashell collection from years spent in the Philippines.

 I interpose objects of the everyday to distort our sense of space, explore our ability to inhabit rooms, and merge the dreamlike with the rigid. I think of paintings as they exist in the home, decorating our lives, using us to give them purpose. And inversely, objects become weirdly functional paintings to question abstraction and reality. My work focuses on the acute and the polite, the domestic and the utilitarian.

 I am an oil painter who creates elaborately detailed paintings of contemporary vanitas. My newest works consider vanitas in a modern context, reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic. In a traditional sense, vanitas alludes to themes of plague, desperation, dehumanization, and loss. Although I have previously looked in this direction for inspiration, these historical paintings of the fleeting world feel more immediate to me than ever. I now see them as compassionate pictures rather than merely ones of dark, glittering glamour.

 How should we question that which recurs daily? It is ordinary to aggrandize the everyday, daydream of what could be, and give significance to the otherwise insignificant. We get caught in ideas of comfort and normalcy as though the everyday holds neither questions nor answers. My work explores these unasked questions and seeks to respond to them, though the answers are often evasive. It concerns itself with illusions void of any tangent with our needs but hinges instead on our social experiences and personal histories.

 The main purpose of my work is to focus on the perception of individual people. Perception, meaning the way that we view others and the way we ourselves would like to appear. Having the influence of the people that I paint makes the painting more personal to them. The personalized clothing and pose combine to create an image that is definitive of that specific person. I want my work to highlight the different attitudes of African American people and point out timely trends that people follow in terms of their appearance.

 I make paintings and sculptures about the multifaceted messiness of communication and the negotiation of being seen, heard, and taken seriously. My work is a reclaiming of uncertainty and a celebration of honesty. The minimal shapes, bold colors, and piecemeal compositions represent moments of agency, sureness, and being unapologetic. It is a proxy for my own voice and by extension a nod to the unheard, misunderstood, and silenced voices of others.

 As a painter and printmaker, I use figurative imagery to facilitate an ongoing dialogue about the Black female body in the hope of showcasing a more balanced perception of our womanhood, one that dismantles prevailing stereotypes. My practice incorporates the production of mixed-media works that seamlessly marry traditional painting and relief printmaking techniques on a single surface. These hybrid works employ the use of pattern, color, and texture to provide a visceral experience that is both universal and specific.