Through exploration of the psychological remnants of post-colonial racialized experiences, I seek to reference the sentiments of fracturing, disorientation and entanglement of a first-generation biracial westerner who lacks direct ties to either the west or the east. By connecting these ideas to traditional European interpretations of landscape and still-life imagery, I investigate the sublime and the psychology of nomadic displacement in my practice.
My works, which include painting, photography, installation, and sculpture, seek to convey splintered moments from my own memory, invoking a nostalgic sense of longing for places that no longer exist, whether in recent or distant history. Considering elements of traditional still-life painting, whether through the representation of light and space or through the simple depiction of a physical object (such as an image on a crumpled piece of paper), my objective is to demonstrate the influence of western colonialism on biracial experiences and histories. The landscapes represented in my work refer to places I have personally experienced or that are encoded with a broad cultural value. These sites become objects as I render them in a still-life manner, recalling precise experiences of my own estrangement. They act as gateways to a deeper conversation of post-colonial displacement. Distorting the landscape to the point that it becomes unidentifiable, I aim to mimic the instability of memory and the precarity of history.
Through my installation and sculptural works I expand on the concept of migration by focusing on the impact of the natural world on the human psyche. These three-dimensional works examine the sublime and the violence of nature in its perpetual cycle of decay and rebirth, as considered in a post-human context. My painting practice echoes these themes as I search for reflections of nature in my materials: through paper, in wooden stretchers, in cotton canvas and in the minerals of oil paints and spirits. In doing so, I myself become a player in the life and death cycle of the materials, employing them in their processed form to depict their organic origins.