My sculptures and installations examine how colonialism continues to shape Black subjectivity through spiritual and sexual violence, bodily discipline, and the disruption of ancestral knowledge. I work primarily with metal, ceramic, wax, and textiles, using casting, mold-making, carving, welding, and heat to transform objects and symbols associated with systems of control. Material manipulation is central to my process, allowing the physical behavior of these materials to register histories of racialized violence. Alongside lived experience, Black theories of social death, fungibility, and Spillers’s concept of captive flesh inform the conceptual framework of my work. I am interested in how inherited systems continue to act upon the body and how material processes can interrogate their authority without resolving the contradictions they produce.
I use the abject and grotesque to intensify the horror embedded in the histories I address. I am drawn to forms that use exaggerated color, texture, and scale to produce unease. In The Disaster (2026), rusted steel shackles are enlarged to bodily scale, their scarred surfaces and protruding welds collapsing the distinction between metal and wounded flesh. In What Is Done Can Be Undone (2026), large wax chains resembling exposed tissue and intestines are suspended around a pipe, gradually collapsing under sustained exposure to heat. In both works, the deterioration and transformation of the materials over time become part of their engagement with captivity and its afterlives. Working against the resistance of heavy or unstable materials requires sustained exertion, connecting the physical act of making to histories of labor. My thinking about these intersections is informed by artists such as Melvin Edwards and Doreen Garner, whose work has shaped my understanding of how material can be used to examine flesh and racialized violence.
Ritual is another recurring structure in my practice. I explore the colonial use of Christianity to suppress African spiritual systems through the structures and practices of ritual. My experience as a queer Yoruba Nigerian raised in an evangelical Christian household, only a few generations removed from ancestors who practiced Isese, gives this history a personal dimension. In Sacred Peace (2025), I repeatedly cast the symbol of a religious badge I was required to wear in various materials, arranging the forms in a grid on the ground. A Body Bent on Apology (2025), an illuminated, suspended wax relief, references the crucifixion and the language of Christian confession to examine religious guilt and coerced belief. Around the Altar (2026) draws from the role of cowrie shells in West African exchange and spiritual practice. These works connect questions of ancestral memory to the disruption of African religious systems.
Across my work, I trace a trajectory of the Black body as contained, penetrated, made abject, and moving toward liberation. I am continuing this investigation by experimenting with the physical relationship between metal and ceramic to produce forms that are simultaneously structural and visceral. Building on my existing use of mixed media, I am interested in how these materials can occupy and resist one another, and how these interactions can push the visual intensity of my sculptures. I want the viewer to confront the contradictions produced by these apparatuses of control and consider how they might be destroyed rather than accepted as inevitable.
