DELFT Blue

Words are important. As such, I’ve long considered the words that are used to describe people whose ancestors were held in bondage in the Americas for 400+ years. Mostly, I’ve heard the overall institution described as “slavery”, and the resourceful, creative, cunning, intelligent, murderous, tender, silly, hardworking, lazy, honest, deceptive, callous, lascivious, prudish, spiritual, heathen, clean, dirty, healthy, diseased… human beings referred to as “slaves”. Beyond the inherent limitations of words, and the American Capitalist tendency toward dichotomy, it seems functionally inaccurate. “Prisoner” appears as a much more descriptive, and, unfortunately, contemporary. And while the loophole of the 13th amendment is now almost mainstream, I am compelled to reconsider imprisonment. Is life actually a kind of imprisonment? We are born into the boundaries of time and space, place and age, hunger and satiation, inhale and exhale, wakefulness and sleep. Yet we all come from boundlessness. Is that the journey? To get back to that which is beyond the pattern…? (((Developing)))

Speaking of patterns, I am working on a full set of dinnerware inspired by Delft Blue pottery, aerial photographs of US correctional facilities, retail parking lots, football stadiums, and the US executive cabinet.

"In this current moment, we are all being asked to determine the nature of advocacy. The suggestion that we each commit to protecting the rights of others, in spite of national, ethnic, gendered, and racial categories is a tremendous endeavor, but not, I'm learning, without precedent. For me, the exploration of these particular histories of solidarity and the collaborative process of identity creation is an opportunity to understand my American Blackness expansively, empathically, interactively. Especially beyond the confines of language and culture into a realm of universal human experience. We all must eat, so who's cooking, serving, and cleaning the dishes?" (REVISED: AUGUST 2020)