Cardboard is a frequent item found in my work. Why? Because it's always around due to being a highly mobile, chronically unhoused person. Cardboard is more than moving boxes to me. It's a canvass that tells part of my relocation story. Every box packed and unloaded is currency. My ancestors had suitcases, bags, clothes on their backs, and seeds in their hair. Their stories were passed along to me through layered DNA. Using that around me, I commune with the cardboard to express stories of transitions, resiliency, and my search for a home that lies inside my womb.
the.shadows | 2020 + 2021 |22 x 30 | water-soluble crayons, metallic watercolor, paper, soft, dry & oil pastels, cardboard, hot glue, acrylic paint | The texture is given by using bubblewrap and metallic paint while living at a 90-day mental health recovery facility. Using straws, I blew liquid acrylic paint on watercolor paper, outlining with pastels, following my healing road trip to Asheville in the summer of 2021. I added a collage element by hot glue cardboard that dated before my most recent mental health sabbatical. The cardboard is layered with magazines cuttings from 2011 with acrylic paint and oil pastels.
until3d | 2020 + 2021 | 22 x 30 | gesso, soft, dry & oil pastels, water-soluble crayons, metallic watercolor, acrylic paint layered and collaged with acrylic paint on cardboard, hot glue, paper | I acquired the advocacy posted used on parts of the cardboard collage road trip back in 2011. The advocacy poster "I AM A MAN" is from the 1960-1970 civil rights movement. I further layered glue collage with paper, magazine cuttings on top of a piece I started in Asheville, NC. As seen on the bottom layer, this piece is made by printing turkey feathers on paper using gesso, acrylic paint. I drew with pastels and filled it in with metallic watercolors.
mother.verse
2020+2021
24 x 46
magazine pages, gesso, paper, oil pastels, glue, acrylic paint, cardboard
I collect magazine clippings of femme women of color, folks who's body resemble mine as a way to break the toxic white supremacist narrative in my brain and body. I glue the clippings with gesso, layering it with more gesso by dropping it from over my head. All topped off with a cutting from a different acrylic poured cardboard session. My art process is how I dance and be with the cardboard.