The Brooklyn Rail

Three drawings united in grief and renewal, death and birth. 

My life—many lives—changed in 2020 with the pandemic. My movements are more considered; I mask as a mode of resistance to the dissociation, gaslighting, and amnesia following this mass-disabling event, acknowledging ourselves at risk. Masked Othered. Masking. 

Three drawings reference specific texts: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); James Baldwin cited in Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020); and M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Dis Place—The Space Between,” from her anthology Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays (1997), cited in Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds (2006). Each likewise relates to other projects: No Need for Clothing, an iterative performance I make by drawing words on walls with charcoal; “Cracks in the Curriculum,” an educational resource for schools I am working on with the Serpentine; and an exhibition I have been commissioned to make new work for, for the Drawing Room in London, called Times of Our Lives. 

These drawings reached maturity “post”-COVID. They mediate the COVID inquiry in the UK and the on-demand Channel 4 program, Partygate, detailing the obscene failings and cronyism that the Tory government has prescribed. 

Consider the artworks mere extensions of a resistance movement toward intergenerational, interspecies liberation, from the tyranny of an imperative that seeks to maintain an imperialist agenda, happy to sacrifice lost labor and dispose of the vulnerable. They make a plea to recognize the humanity in ourselves and others before our return to compost.