Artist statement
My painting begins with a pursuit of beauty: the sweep of a contour, the meeting of colours, the weight of a body within a room. I draw from the world I see and experience, giving familiar gestures and surroundings an imagined life. My practice unfolds through two ongoing projects, What Blooms While We Are Still and A Chorus Without a Mouth, connected by an expressive language of bold lines, saturated colour and layered marks.
In What Blooms While We Are Still, Black figures, with Black women at the centre, inhabit carefully composed settings. They recline across sofas, cross their legs, stretch or fold inward. I am interested in how posture gives feeling a shape: the difference between resting comfortably and searching for ease, between occupying space freely and gathering oneself into it. Fatigue, freedom, liberation and their absence enter the paintings through these small arrangements of the body.
Black women are central to this work because they are central to my experience of the world. Having grown up surrounded by strong Black women, I return to their presence with familiarity and admiration. Their strength holds room for tenderness, pleasure, fatigue and repose. Representation is essential to my painting and writing, beginning with close attention to the people and surroundings that shape what I know.
The figures hold their poses while the painted surface continues to move. Strong black contours meet fine, wandering lines that circle limbs, trace garments and gather across upholstery. Broad brushstrokes leave their movement visible. Reds meet greens, turquoise opens around brown skin, and yellow interrupts fields of cobalt and pink. Furniture tilts, proportions stretch, and flattened spaces bring bodies and their surroundings into close contact.
Flowers participate in this movement. They appear within a room or expand into curling forms that begin to organise the composition. Stems echo the sweep of an arm; petals answer the folds of fabric. The title What Blooms While We Are Still extends this relationship beyond the flowers themselves, toward the feelings, associations and forms that can unfold within a quiet moment.
In A Chorus Without a Mouth, I am developing abstraction through a mixture of figures, marks and forms that strongly connect to my love of music. I am interested in the energy of sound and in the need to express loud noise through soundless paintings. Lines, symbols and fields of colour become like musical gestures, carrying rhythm, volume and intensity without producing an audible note. The figures do not simply represent bodies; they move, overlap and gather like voices within a chorus.
Coronation of Noise is one painting within this exploration. Its crown-like structure, intersecting marks and charged colour bring different movements into a shared space. I am interested in how a painting can hold the force of music: its repetition, dissonance, pulse and release. Through abstraction, I can translate the experience of listening into visual terms, allowing colour and line to become a kind of sound.
Working closely with artists during my time at Addis Fine Art encouraged me to express my own feelings through painting. I continue to find inspiration in Ethiopian artists including Tizta Berhanu, Tariku Shiferaw, Selome Muleta, Tesfaye Urgessa and Seyoum Ayalew, among many others, alongside Paul Gauguin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Diego Rivera. Looking at their work keeps me attentive to the possibilities of colour, the expressive force of a mark and the many ways a figure can inhabit a painting.
Titles extend the work through fragments of conversation and poetic suggestion. I Told the Flowers First, Where Flowers Learn My Name and Coronation of Noise each offer another point of entry. As both projects develop, I follow the exchanges between body and setting, stillness and gesture, image and sound, letting each painting discover its own way of holding beauty and noise.
