Labored Bodies is a series of works that use of certain materials to allude to various subject matters.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade, labor of a working class in America through the use of vintage textiles, and the history of painting by re-contextualizing the canvas and frame.

Hands have shown up in the work. They are literal and symbolic references to labor and people. Hands have been at the center of decision making, wealth, slavery, motherhood, etc. Hands nurture and hands harm. These works use collage as the medium to explore these ideas. 

Resist(her) is an intersectional project between documentary photography and painting, time and history. The images of women of color, are labeled with the context of the time and the photographer, not who the women are even though their bodies were used as objects of resistance. Their histories and identities are invisible. I wanted to explore what it means to bring attention to them. A version of this work exists as a time based pieces merging digital painting and the actual photo.

When rest isn't afforded to all, it becomes an imaginative space. Tricia Hersey said "My rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body." I am investigating rest, through various mediums. 

"The formal qualities of black abstract art makes reference to both the contemporary and historical black experience. In moments of grief, emotion seeps onto the canvas in ways that can’t otherwise be conveyed."  -Shantay Robinson

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