Residual Stains #3 Print

My practice is performative, contemplative, and transformative. I am inspired by plants, nature, our living world, and my connection to land through home country Lesotho and Southern African culture. I find joy in using pigments of the earth, working with flowers, learning about the plants around me, creating art from ephemeral materials such as soil, and sharing this urgent need that we have as a society to reconnect back to our lands. I am also interested in looking at history through reading the land and stories told by plants like tea and coffee, while deeply listening to them. My use of tea stems back to my childhood, where we always had a stream of visitors and had conversations, storytelling over tea. This idea of community and storytelling are important to my practice. Being an immigrant with a strong commitment to social justice work in the South and West sides of Chicago, my artwork comments on displacement, the African diaspora, the loss of the sense of home and a need to reconnect to our plant Ki and Kin. I invite the audience to find a space to contemplate through installation, written work, or my abstract tea and coffee paintings.