“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was.” - Toni Morrison
I am a mother, a river, a poet-whisperer.
My birth began my family’s first generation after the Civil Rights Act and its fifth generation post-Emancipation. Situating myself in time in this way demonstrates an understanding that past, present, and future cannot be separated from one another. My practice reflects this fluidity of time, illustrating how significant events in American history left their marks on the lives of the ancestors and elders of my family, and also how those events remain present in younger generations. Beliefs, behaviors, values are heirlooms passed from one generation to the next. This inheritance is visible in our landscapes, cultural environments, and in the mythologies we hold onto.
A river runs from its present in one place to its future in another, gradually and meticulously shaping its surroundings along the way. In its constant flow of water and dynamic change, time collapses. Past, present, and future exist simultaneously. The women in my family are also rivers—recorders and keepers of recipes, stories, photographs, documents, and traditions. Through their guidance, I have found that events of the past simultaneously shape our present and future. I work across media, gathering still and moving images, documents, objects, sound, and oral narratives. These archival elements are transformed through my creative process becoming monuments of duality: past and present, nature and artifice, obsolescence and relevance, strength and oppression, pride and anger, joy and grief, memory and recorded history, evidence and critique.
Grateful for the strength, perseverance, and vision of my ancestors, I follow their example while also forging a new path by combining this collection of evidence with my own interpretation and response. Morrison once said that her writing draws on emotional and embodied memory. Inspired by her strategy for combining imagination with the archive, I create a new history and personal geography through accumulations of objects, images, media, and text along with physically occupying space with my body. Looking back is equally important to my practice as looking forward. Accepting this role as past keeper, present shaper, and future builder comes with responsibilities. The stories of the past are a gift. They hold knowledge, wisdom, complexity and mystery. It is my task to hold them, to keep them, to distill their lessons, to foster healing, to apply their wisdom in my own life, and to pass them on, intact and with annotation.
