Praise To The Godlands (2024-Ongoing)
xAll My Loved Ones Are Blueing, Are Blueing, Are Blue
Year of completion: 2025/2026
Medium: Mixed-media textile art
Size: 246cm x 320cm
Additional information: Exhibition view from Onassis AiR Open Days, Onassis Foundation, Curated by Nefeli Myroda. Photo by Stephie Grape.
Materials used: East African Macawis (Sarong textile) in cotton, and silk, embroidered cyanotype, and heat transfer archival family photos, sublimation print self portrait, collected family memorabilia (buttons, doilies, broaches), embroidered found objects (rice bag).
This is the second textile sculpture from my longterm project Praise To The Godlands (2024-ongoing). Using an assortment of blue Macawis (sarong) textiles, it examines my family’s histories of migration across water, alongside themes of ghostliness, spectrality and porousness. I use a coral like motif throughout the entirety of the piece to trace emotional, oceanic and memorial sites: the distances between the living and the dead, between what is remembered and forgotten, between inherited histories and imagined futures.
In my photographic printing processes, I juxtapose the ephemerality of cyanotype family archives with the permanence of sublimation and heat transfer techniques on raw Ethiopian cotton and silk. In doing so, I bring together images destined to fade alongside myths and oral histories that have endured across generations.
In All My Loved Ones Are Blueing, Are Blueing, Are Blue, I seek to create a makeshift resting place for my dead in fabric, a threshold they can enter through in perpetuity. The textile sculptures become vessels through which to contain, to preserve forgotten spirits onto cloth. The work as a result becomes its own sort of fluid mnemonic monument. Within the textile sculptures I am primarily interested in excavating and contending with what scholar Christina Sharpe terms an ‘outraged archive’ I seek to offer my outraging ghosts a space to unburden, a space to commune, to breathe alongside their living once more. The Macawis allows me to do this, due to its own migratory history. The textile becomes a site where these accumulated journeys can be held simultaneously, where familial memory can be understood not as a stable inheritance but as a constantly shifting constellation of routes, returns, and reappearances.
“The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories”
-Hua Tsu
Cyanotype archival family photo details from All My Loved Ones Are Blueing, Are Blueing, Are Blue (2025/2026)
“Gone, the rest of us. We plow memory, survival, bleeding gums. The dead aren’t departing by sea. There are decades of song.” -Zeina Hashem Beck
Details from All My Loved Ones Are Blueing, Are Blueing, Are Blue (2025/2026)
Year of completion: 2024
Medium: Mixed-media textile art
Size: 236cm x 396cm
Additional information: Exhibition view from Encounters, Black Rock Senegal group show at Centre Culturel Blaise Senghor, Dakar, Senegal, for the OFF of the 15th Dak’art Biennale 2024, curated by Dr Jareh Das.
Materials used: East African Macawis (sarong) in cotton, and spun silk. Embroidered canvas print self portraits & archival family photos, collected family memorabilia (maternal and paternal grandmother's buttons, doilies, broaches), embroidered found objects (rice bags).
This piece was recently selected to be exhibited as part of the 18th International Triennial of Textile in Łódź, Poland between October 11 2025- April 20 2026, curated by Bukola Oyebode-Westerhuis & Marta Kowalewska.
In conceptualizing this piece, I was drawn to the mnemonic qualities of textiles particularly the relationship they’re able to tease between loss & memory. I chose the macawiis fabric for its hybridity, a textile rooted in cultural exchange, a textile rooted in the reimaginings of conventional notions of masculinity .
This piece is my first foray into a larger body of work/ a new world I hope to create & inhabit, the creation of an origin story through cloth. In it I am interested in the ways in which we account for the omission of bodies & histories deemed peripheral; irredeemable. I am interested in studying the silences that exist in language, what they represent what is being omitted, what is unsayable?
“We have little time to please the living. We have an eternity to love the dead.”
-Sophocles Antigone
Installation views This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024
Details from This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024)
“What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in our push towards our death?”
-Christina Sharpe
Self portraits from This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024)