I build and dissect fantastical narratives, spaces, and autonomous avatars using themes of fragmented memory, mutation, mythology, cosmology, religion, spirituality, fear, faith, and the phantasmal. The manifestation of these avatars and narratives morph across mediums, originating as prose-poetry texts, mixed media collages, and experimental performance pieces. I draw from the Ifá spiritual practice of Nigeria (specifically Egun, the collective spirit of all the ancestors in a person’s lineage), role-playing video games centered around character design/open-world access, and archetypes in Christianity and Greco-Roman mythology serve as additional inspirations. I take from these elements to form — literal and figurative — exquisite corpses that center women of the African diaspora reclaiming power from positions of self-determination while defying the rules of borders, of space, and of time. These space-bending stars, my angels, represent the total freedom accessible through evolving past powers that seek to constrain ideal physical, spiritual, and emotional states – uninhibited evolution as a survival mechanism in the face of inevitable change.

The angels depicted within my works are reinterpretations of the angels of biblical scripture in form and significance while also acting as surrogates imbued with intent, feelings, a message, and a purpose. My angels are not unaffected or unscathed by the violence and truth of the history of Christian colonialism, but on the contrary — they exist as an honest portrayal of what symbols of purity, unease, and resilience have the capacity to resemble. They are embodied in bodies, spirits, and disembodied forms having persevered through colonial violence amongst other forms of perversion. This representation expands from images and depictions that are visceral, grotesque, and humanoid in form to more phantasmal and ethereal embodiments that communicate an explicit non-corporeal nature and form. I interrogate and reinterpret the theology of angels by starkly contrasting how this moral symbol appears across visual culture. Through this reclamation, my angels exist as agents and avatars for communicating a range of phenomena, including affective emotions, elements of the periodic table, and geological terrains. As threshold entities imbued with a message, their purpose manifests on a material level through my depictions of them throughout my work: they are fractures in time, materializing in moments where the boundaries between worlds blur, like static crackling between planes of reality. They’re tremors that ripple through history, erasing the lines between myth and matter, the collective and the singular, the divine and the human.

As human beings, we are naturally inclined to place our faith in powers, figures, and futures beyond ourselves. Throughout history, these outlets for faith have often become dogmas of control, as seen within the history of Christian colonialism. I’m interested in what happens when we redirect this raw faith into powers that can liberate us from all that seeks to constrain, powers that center self-determination and a belief in the singular power that we hold as individuals. The works I make and share are alternative offerings of visual anchors to something beyond the self to push forward in spite of uncertainty, so I visualize new ways of sewing my interests in myth building, astrophysics, and cosmology into my interrogations of religious semiotics and symbols.