To make my nkisi paintings, I often paint on unique structures such as embroidery hoops, wooden die cuts, or plexiglass covered with unique fabrics that shine (like spandex) and create transparence and texture (like chiffons). I create rich and ornate textures of glimmering found and ready made objects like jewelry notions, mirrors, feathers, crystals, sequins, and glitter. My paintings are tactile and abstract. They include imagery from the ocean, nature, and symbols from mythology. The forms in my paintings reflect people, relationships, and dynamics in my life in abstract ways.

Nkisi is a word from the Kongo translated as “things that do things”and I believe in each painting’s ability to heal me or activate my life when I create. I believe in the power of painting to activate a space with love, dreams, and blessings, which can radiate to the viewers who experience it. The materials I use in my work extend my intentions as they catch light from and shine light onto the viewers and spaces where they hang. The titles I choose for my paintings come from music that inspires me and which reflects the desired effect of the painting.






I create visual art to conceive of, and shape, my emotional, spiritual, and thought-based
responses to life. I work intuitively, creating abstract or narrative scenarios. The still lives I create are simultaneously portraits and landscape/places. As both an individual, and as a fractal of a larger culture, I look towards a dialogue between the natural and artificial
worlds as the barometer of my spiritual state.

Seashells, which offer forms for much of my work, provide potential as characters, as places, as states, that I deeply process. Reflective materials give and receive light. They allow for environmental transformation and are literal carriers of visual information. 
(2013)

These paintings act as little mirrors of human relationships. They chew away at questions about the deportment of painting: how does a painting hold an emotion? Each one of these contains a pulse of desire and connection that form a constellation.

The artist's process is a generative one, assigning roles to proxies which are sifted into an entropic scattering. The shell paintings provide habitats for scavenged situations, connections, and coincidences. Subject and place saturate each other, echoing or dissolving into one another.

(2008)