Heirloom is a space to consider what, who, and where will be our keepsakes. In my creative practice, collage is about relationships of memory, landscape, time, and the physicality of material. Using National Geographic magazines, medical textbooks, case law books, and US history books, collage highlights moments of fracture, material border formations, shadows, rupture, and surrealism. Hauntings in our landscapes and formal archives invite me to tear and rip into my source material as an archival practice.  I’m interested in how institutions of medicine, athletics, and law mediate our intimacies with each other and manufacture our understanding of how to build a more liberatory future.

 

I draw from mundane and quotidian relational acts——weight-lifting, reading, foraging, looking, touching, hearing——that invite me toward an alternative way of relating to memory in my body. How can mixed-methods, woven possibilities of archival practice, such as collage, guide me to more honest relationships within myself, my past, and my future? How can collage be an abolitionist method – a surrealist, iterative tool that is as much about presence as it is about absence, after Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Collage illuminates these concerns in acknowledging our shatteredness and grief as individuals and as a society. Can we utilize creative archival practice to more fully and honestly embody our imaginations of what is possible, instead of what is merely understood as logistical and practical? 

 

The Freeman Artist Residency invited me into twelve months of studio time, in order to  land safely into my post-graduate exhaust. The studio allowed me space to re-settle into my body and release the hold of linear, academic, and logical methods into a trust for play and tactile making. Embracing intuitive artistic practices—letting the body be a guide for making—I released trust into tactile approaches to knowledge production. Leaning into new methodologies of creative process allowed my subconscious to leak into my work, illuminating my political messages in more nuanced material forms. After Audre Lorde’s erotics, the methods I learned in this residency took me to a space of  transformation that I did not know previously possible.

 

I am inspired by and in conversation with works by Saidiya Hartman, Justine Kurland, Katrien de Blauwer, Jackie Sumell, Tay Butler, Gal Costa, J Dilla, 9th Wonder, NourbeSe Philip, my paternal grandmother, and my intergenerational movement family here in Charlottesville.