My sculptures and installations are ways of reaching toward what was taken—an attempt to reanimate fractured ontologies and to mourn what has been buried under the weight of forced conversion, cultural shame, and bodily violation. My current work centers spiritual and sexual violence, not only as tools historically used to dominate and discipline colonized bodies, but as intergenerational traumas often carried in silence.
I work with found domestic objects, burlap, steel, wax, chicken wire, and wood not only for their tactility but for their historical and ancestral weight, as these materials carry legacies of labor, mourning, and forced assimilation. In A Body Bent on Apology (2025), wax functions as a stand-in for skin and flesh because of its tenderness, instability, and vulnerability to heat and time, while hand-dyed red burlap, a recurring motif across my sculptures and installations, signifies blood, trauma, and urgency and recalls the biblical sackcloth worn by Tamar after her rape. The burlap’s rough, utilitarian texture underscores the violence it references while marking how sexual trauma is often obscured or silenced through religious doctrine. Across my practice, figures resist legibility and assimilation, bearing memory across lifetimes through veiled and distorted surfaces that assert opacity as a mode of resistance. In works such as Eating the Other (2025) and Passing Through (2025), partially exposed chicken wire beneath the burlap reads as a violated interior made public, while the materials’ gradual decomposition insists on a living, unfolding relationship to memory rather than a fixed representation.
There is an overlapping personal and geopolitical context at the core of my practice. As a queer Yoruba person raised in an evangelical Christian household, I grew up within a culture that actively suppressed the cosmologies and ancestral knowledge of my own people. I am separated from my land, traditional religions, and ancestors who resisted and rejected multiple forms of violence: spiritual, sexual, colonial, and domestic. My works, such as Sacred Peace (2026) and Around the Altar (2026), are, therefore, an interrogation of Christofascism and its role in the colonial project. I build sculptures that confine, bind, or distort the body to mirror the theological apparatuses that once disciplined mine. Through these gestures, I reject the authoritative visual grammar of domination and instead claim opacity, refusal, and embodied knowledge as forms of liberation.
My artmaking is informed by a lineage of Black artists who engage vulnerability, resistance, and spiritual reclamation, including Otobong Nkanga, Yinka Shonibare, Doreen Garner, Njaimeh Njie, and Wangechi Mutu. Nkanga’s linking of land, body, and extraction and Shonibare’s visualizations of exile and hybridity shape my thinking around dispossession, architecture, and fractured notions of home, while Garner’s use of flesh and Mutu’s mythic, hybrid figures inform my engagement with bodily violation, fragmented identity, and ancestral futurity. Across my practice, I draw from contemporary Black feminisms and decolonial thought to examine visibility, desire, and domination, grounding my work in the writings of Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe. Their frameworks on libidinal economies, necropolitics, the afterlives of slavery, and ongoing racialized violence shape how I construct bodies, atmospheres, and sites of mourning within my work.
My work does not seek to resolve trauma or offer catharsis but rather to create a space where damage can be seen, where memory can take form, and where Black people refuse to be forgotten. Each piece contributes to a larger ecosystem of resistance: one that centers Black and Indigenous survival and reclaims the right to spiritual and embodied complexity.
