Artist Statement

Gardens are simultaneously natural and unnatural constructed spaces. Their aesthetics are informed by taxonomy and hegemony, systems of colonial oppression. Race and gender are also constructed spaces. Entire territories are cultivated, and queer bodies of color are excised.

If migrants are forced to relocate due to war, racism, or state-sanctioned homophobia, are they considered invasive species in new homes, or do they gain endemic status? The Middle Passage—a forcible uprooting—brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. When these diasporic organisms propagated in their new territories, they bridged the flora and fauna of multiple continents.

I explore this cultural, botanical, and material hybridity through paintings, textiles, printmaking, and site-responsive installations that reference plant forms across equatorial zones. These plant motifs investigate nostalgic fictions of the Caribbean built from history, memory, and family lore. Using collage, abstraction, stencils, and natural dyes, I both preserve and transform references to my parents’ birth countries (Trinidad, Jamaica, the Philippines) in order to visually undo the simultaneous invisibility and exotification of tropical bodies.

Drawing from decorative and scientific visual languages, my work explores landscape, fantasy, queerness, migration, endemism vs. invasiveness, and the relationship between body and environment.