Artist Statement (Excerpt #2)

Black women are the thread that has woven the tapestry of our collective history. While consistently repairing the frayed fabric and torn edges, Black women remain the most disregarded and least cared for people on the planet. Yet we continue our care. While we have not been the cause of the ruptures that have resulted from systemic violence, white supremacist heteropatriarchy, and structural racism, it is us who have tended to those wounds. We have been the doulas and the midwives of this country. We’ve offered care, even to our oppressors.

In 1921 after Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Act, midwives were banned from hospitals as a result of smear campaigns attempting to discredit their work.

Through Federal gatekeeping, midwifery, as it was traditionally practiced by African-descended Black women, began to diminish. The Federal government, alongside white male obstetricians and gynecologists, labeled these women outdated, barbaric, uncleanly, and uneducated. Government systems that favored the capital produced by obstetrics used the “mammy” archetype to understate, undermine and collapse these women’s wisdom and sheer intuitive skill into primitive perilousness, claiming that they needed the intervention of white male physicians and western medicine. Meanwhile, throughout history, Black women had breastfed, raised, and nurtured much of the white population in this country. It was black women whose bodies were lacerated and violently operated on during unanesthetized nonconsensual gynecologic experiments in the name of obstetrics. It is no coincidence that the Black maternal and infant mortality rates are three to four times higher than white maternal and infant mortality rates in the U.S.

Many of us would not exist were it not for the work of Black women herbalists, root women, and midwives. This work lives in my bones, and inside of many of us who identify as Black and Indigenous women of color. 

Time travel is a significant theme in this work. This space is an opportunity to traverse timelines. This first space serves as the portal and path of entry into the liminal. Liminality being a space betwixt and between; devoid of time as we know it. The second room is an invocation; a safe space that invokes the spirits of these women through the use of textiles, textures, sounds, smells, handwritten text, time-specific furnishings, hanging herbs, and layered cabinets. This is a call to remember and honor. Pieces like the vintage radio and phone reference frequency, wavelength, and communication between thresholds. I’m asking these women to come teach me to live in the frequency of the love they knew so purely and shared so freely. 

In making space for the unseen and the non-physical, I imagine these women in the room; resting, congregating, praying, communing, summoning, studying, and leaning on one another for care and fellowship. Many of the items in this space belonged to my Grandmothers and the Grandmothers of beloved women in my life. Through engaging in the simultaneity of time, a term coined by Vanessa German, we awaken to the timeless and call on memory to become palpable reality. Liminal spaces are at the center of every rite of passage in life; these are not spaces to fear, but to be fully present in, as core aspects of ourselves are transformed. And on the other side of transformation, of birth or death; we remember the women who ushered the way.

Artwork Descriptions -

1) “Grandma / i am accused of tending to the past,” 

Portrait of my Grandmother, June 2020 

Accompanied by the poem "i am accused of tending to the past" by Lucille Clifton 

Archival Pigment on Photo Rag Paper

20" X 24" 

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2) “I remember you” 

Multi-sensory Installation, 2022

Found and family photographs of Black Women herbalists, root women and midwives; Vintage wash table with enamel basin and pitcher, the Jackson family’s old perfume bottle (courtesy of Shannon Maith), elderberry syrup, elder flower, elderberry hydrosol, elderberry seed oil, plant essences and essential oils, rose water, memory

Hanging herbs and plants:

Roses, eucalyptus, holy basil 

Sound by:

Phylicia Ghee, sound effects created with water and wash basin

Sound Engineer:

Evan Kornblum

Artwork Description: 

Memory has a way of keeping things alive or re-enlivening them. 

At the center of the wash table is a pendant made by my Mother; carefully created using the gears of a deconstructed clock representing each member of our family alongside emblems of faith, perseverance and the circular nature of time. My Mother and I, unknowingly, explore mirrored symbologies. This pendant marks a new agreement she made with herself and is a microcosm of all the themes represented in this exhibition. I’m reminded of a saying she always used when I was a child: “What goes around comes around”. The presence of the pendant is honoring my Mother’s courage, fortitude, intuitive genius and deep abiding love. She is another great love of my life. 

This entry into the exhibition serves as a portal, Elderberry facilitating the opening. As an ancient herb, very significant in Black herbalist traditions, Elder is symbolic for the elders I am honoring in this space. The Elder tree in its fruit and flowers, hold the energy and magic of transitory spaces; that of birth and death, rebirth and renewal, transition and transformation. Elder is both protective and restorative. 

This moment of reflection at the wash table offers an opportunity for pause, ‘rememory’, presence and sensory embodiment. There is an agreement being made here, to lay down whatever you’ve been carrying, in preparation for crossing the threshold into the next moment. 

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3) Elderberry Syrup 

(Sambucus canadensis)

Ingredients: elderberries, ginger, cinnamon stick, cloves & raw honey

Visitors are advised to:

Take one vial of elderberry syrup, 

remove the cork and drink.

Place used vial in box below wash table 

*Note, elderberry syrup is very high in vitamin C and a powerful preventative and cold remedy. Filled with antioxidants, nutrients and vitamins, elderberry boosts and protects the immune system.

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4) “Mommy, Grandma & Granny”

Ingredients: 

Mommy – Holy Basil Hydrosol + Essential Oils

Grandma – Rose and Geranium Hydrosol + Essential Oils

Granny – Sweetwater Hydrosol + Essential Oils

Visitors are advised to:

Mist yourself with each fragrance, 

let the scent wash over you.

Special thanks to Krystal C. Mack for conversations that led to the development of this work. 

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