Artist's Statement

I am a contemporary artist born in Sierra Leone, based in Cambridge, with a studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. My practice lives at the intersection of memory, material, and cultural inheritance.

Working across woven sculpture, painting, textile, and printmaking, I explore how ancestral forms can be reimagined within contemporary art. My work draws from African and diasporic visual languages, particularly the Sandé mask tradition of Sierra Leone—not as artifact, but as a living system of knowledge shaped by feminine strength, refinement, and spiritual authority.

Material is central to my practice. I work with yarn, jute, beads, leather, thread, and reclaimed garments—materials that carry both physical and symbolic histories. Through basket-making techniques, binding, layering, and repetition, I transform these elements into sculptural paintings and forms that hold tension between softness and monumentality, intimacy and presence.

My ongoing body of work, Supernal Beauty, reframes narratives around African womanhood and ritual aesthetics. Rather than approaching tradition through an ethnographic lens, I engage it as lineage, alive, evolving, and deeply intelligent. The works are not reproductions of inherited forms; they are translations. They ask what it means to honor origin while speaking in a contemporary voice.

Printmaking is another essential component of my practice. Through monotypes, pochoir monotypes, and etchings, I explore gesture, repetition, and botanical forms inspired by Sierra Leonean wildflowers and memory landscapes. These works extend my sculptural language into surface, flattening and expanding it simultaneously.

At the core of my work are questions of continuity and transformation:
How does memory live in material?
How does heritage evolve without disappearing?
How do we build structure through beauty?
I see my studio as both an archive of ancestral memory and a site of ritual. The act of weaving becomes meditation. Repetition becomes discipline. Form becomes a way of thinking.

Through my practice, I create work that bridges the ancestral and the contemporary—objects that carry history yet feel present and forward-moving. My work invites viewers into a conversation about identity, resilience, our shared humanity, and the quiet power embedded in cultural memory.