Splendor
Here, time appears to me as a wheel in which life and death endlessly embrace, one making way for the other.
The Dreaming Land:
A World Beyond Pain
Begun in the summer of 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings and deep in the midst of a global pandemic, Splendor is a photographic series which explores the relationship between the black feminine body and the land. The creation of the series arose from a primal yearning for beauty and a desire to create lush, sensual images of Blackness that would function as a critical counterpoint to the onslaught of traumatic images of death and violence that flood the cultural consciousness.
Splendor supplants violence with tenderness, revisioning the relationship between blackness and the land from one tangled up in America’s history of enslavement and forced labor to one dripping in romance and mystery. It supplants the mandated isolation of the pandemic with the spiritual introspection of solitude. Imbued with a sense of magic and mysticism, Splendor beacons the viewer beyond a narrative of pain and into a world where healing, self-recovery, and reunion with life is possible.
Splendor
Digital Photographs, Text
Dimensions variable
2020-Ongoing
I’ve spent the majority of the pandemic sequestered in the woods of western New York, about an hour away from where I spent my childhood. I am so moved by the ability of the land to return me to myself, even in the midst of the heartbreak and devastation this year has brought. Being on this land, walking through these woods, touching these waters reminds me of what is easy to forget—all things change and change is beautiful.
Here, time appears to me as a wheel in which life and death endlessly embrace, one making way for the other.
What death consumes, life breathes itself back into: from the rotting, fallen tree grows the lushness of the forest, erotic and thrumming; from the dead rabbit on the pathway blooms the pale white rose of sharon, opening in the morning and closing with the night.
The punishing brutality of this year has been inescapable. What can grow from it? In me—love. A love of self, of family and community, of blackness as the central ground in which to plant. A hunger for freedom has taken root where before there was fear. Its tendrils reach backwards and forwards in time, weaving a green web of desire for
more,
more,
more.
A few months ago I dreamed I died and was buried in the moon.
Not on the surface, but in its center, as though the moon were an orange which had been peeled open and I was a seed placed right at its heart.
In my dream I lay entombed for three days. On the third day I woke in a moon made of clay.
I pushed and swam until I was out, floating in black open space.
She is not here. She has risen.
I am alive.
I want to live.
I want to taste everything. I am hungry not just for freedom, but for all unseen things which are born in the pitch black space of dream. Joy rises from this place and so does Splendor.