Textured, Self-Portraits
We Are Textured
My art-making practice is often invested in material, texture and time – looking at the fashioning and transformation of materials and textures over time by a process of exposure to various elements. This body of work sustains this concern by considering self as a material that is continually being remade and transmuted by temporal processes of history, memory and exposures to the ebb and flow of sociocultural forces and everyday contacts. I appropriate the ideas of the late Jamaican cultural scholar Rex Nettleford’s who repeatedly made reference to a Caribbean “textured ancestry” and “the texture of human existence.”
I meld images of myself with photographs of textured surfaces – surfaces marked by time: an old wooden door, a cracked worn floor, the flaking seat of a chair and the battered bark of a tree, among others, to investigate hybrid and complicated corporeal and psychic states. I weave myself (the word “texture” comes from the Latin “textura” meaning “weaving”) into the world around me, inspecting that relationship, examining connections to moments and spaces in which past and present continuously coexist – probing a self that is not only made of flesh and blood but one that is ever shaped by and imprinted with the myriad elements of life in its unfolding. The portraits allow me to consider self in its multidimensionality; as a notion that is constructed in and across time. I use my physiognomy as a metaphor for a first person plural condition, in other words, a “We.” In exploring myself, I am, at once, scrutinizing ourselves in all of our complex, textured states of being and becoming.