As a mixed race child adopted into a white home and raised in a white town, I grew up with a deep sense of disconnection, displacement, and separation.  My experience of Blackness as a child was that of Other. Hair was central to my feelings of powerlessness, invisibility and loneliness. My mom referred to my hair as a “rat’s nest” and cut it short despite my protests and my desperate desire for “pretty girl hair.” I missed out on motherly touch, time and attention through hair care, and grew up severed from this matrilineal cultural connection. 

Later, in young adulthood, I found my way to hair salons and living rooms and around kitchen tables, finally joining the immersed in the conversations that had been passed between Black women from mother to daughter, sister to sister, friend to friend since the beginning of time. There was hair and there were afros and locs and braids, but more than that, there were shared experiences and knowing.

In recent work, I liken my own experiences as a Black girl in isolation to the broader experience of modern Black Americans. Separated from the original mother. Home but still yearning for home. Defiantly, creatively and inextricably claiming space — forever connected to the landscape and the history of this place.

In these new works, I use braids to reconnect to a healed past for myself and for my community. The matrilineal mythology is characterized by breasts that offer care and nurturing. Braids reclaim this alien landscape and turn it into a new home.

Mothership represents the mythological mother and the mythological motherland. Her comforting breasts nurture and support your feet dangling tentatively to the ground. She holds you. You are safe.

In A Piece of the Place, braids act as connective tissue between two branches. Where the braids touch, home is claimed. Similarly, Bitch I’m from Here, defiantly claims space by setting out a spiral of feet sculptures embedded with seed pods that grow and proliferate.

Some of the braids I use are crafted in communal settings, and their abundance embodies the spirit of togetherness and resilience. Through “Re-Mother”,  a large womb-like chair woven with braids and adorned with breasts, and its companion “Re-home”, a film that captures the intimacy of women braiding together, these works highlight the significance of community as a source of nourishment and a place of comfort. 

Through these works, I repair my own childhood as well as the disconnected lineage of Black Americans by creating a new mythology. I travel back in time to imagine an alternative, mothered history.

Other pieces are meant to serve as powerful reminders of the inextricable Blackness in the American landscape.