Since I was a child, writing has been the way I process who I am, what I think, and what is happening in my life. As an adopted black child in a dysfunctional white family, there was a disconnect of self, and writing was a refuge. Growing up in Idaho, there was no one to identify with or reflect back my own image. I was absent in the world around me. So instead I built that image through writing; it was a place to make sense of myself in the world. Writing has allowed me to survive the major traumas of my life–addiction, sexual abuse, and self-destructive behaviors–and begin the healing process. At times, writing has been the only thing I had to save me from self-obliteration.

Over the years, I have amassed journals, letters, diaries, publications–physical pieces of writing that prove my existence and contain a private, true self. I use these writings as a basis for visual work in the forms of box tableaux, book sculptures, wood-and-paper sculptures, live performance and writing, and installations.

In the box tableaux, I began exploring the idea of my own absence in the context of being a black child in Idaho. I cut myself out of photographs from my childhood and set myself at a remove from that scene to articulate my invisibility. Then I began to use self-portraits to explore an emergence of self through psychiatric drugs and nudity. The boxes acted as a kind of permission to take up space; as I continue to work with them they get bigger, more complex, and more revelatory.

The book sculptures and wood-and-paper sculptures are an outgrowth of the box work; rather than filling a box with images, I create structures by excavating the interiors of my journals and giving a more dimensional physicality to the handwritten paper. By inverting the journals, I expose their contents, thereby exposing myself, and transforming both in the process. The mirror-like oval frames of the wood-and-paper sculptures reflect a self that cannot be contained.  Before this process, the writing and my secret self were obscured between the covers of the journals. For me, allowing myself and my writing to be exposed is part of the healing process, like a wound that needs oxygen to heal.

These sculptures are elements of immersive installations, which I use to build an intimate environment for my audiences. The installations include hanging pages of personal ephemera, writing that occupies entire walls, and interactive elements such as places for viewers to write on the wall, or beds in which viewers can write in journals. The installations also include projections of live writing; my presence and liveness are important to creating a sense of intimacy. The works cease being mere objects, but rather components of a life.

Essential to all of this work is the idea of exposure; the interior being revealed, whether that of the object or the self. Exposure is the process of making-real: taking an internal truth, allowing it to come to light, and uniting interior and exterior realities.