Around the Altar, 2026
Ceramic clay, wood, jute twine
4’ x 4’
The platform and shells function as one system: the platform references the Fon asen, an altar used in ancestral ritual, removed from its original context, while the fleshy cowrie shells carry histories of exchange and spiritual practice into that new setting. Their fleshy surfaces connect to Hartman’s and Spillers’s writing on fungibility and the treatment of Black flesh as exchangeable. Their repetition reintroduces ritual organization through accumulation and arrangement, raising questions about how cultural memory is maintained after the structures that transmitted it have been disrupted. Ritual knowledge and cultural memory threaten the colonial systems that removed them from their original context.
