Artist Statement

My art practice is inspired by my experiences as a fat woman of mixed heritage, African American from the Southern United States and Afro Latina from Panama, Central America. I use the mediums of oil painting, digital painting, printmaking, and sculpture. I seek to use my art as both a means of reflecting our history, and the time in which we live now. To that point, I strive to incorporate the worlds of traditional(past) and digital(now) in all of my processes. I use digital methods to plan my traditional works and use traditional sketches or mark making of textures for my digital works.

My artwork uses human and animal figures to explore complex identities, narratives, and symbolism influenced by my experience with the culture, color, flora, and fauna of the Southern United States and Central America. I use painting to creatively share my cultural experiences and provide representation of larger bodies and women of color where there are often none in the modern fine art world. I desire to display things not seen as traditionally beautiful, of value or worthy of being deemed art, as beautiful, of tremendous value and worth to be seen as art. I paint because I wish to make visible what has historically been condemned as invisible.

In my recent work I have been exploring the use of faces as a narrative or expression or concealment, identity of oneself or one that is imposed. I use color and texture, distortion, or fragmentation to call attention, and demand that the viewer see this person, face, mask, who has been marginalized, ignored, dismissed. The figure must be seen and valued.