Conjuring Moments
Conjuring Moments
Archival Inkjet Prints on Canvas and India Ink and Acrylic Paint on Archival Inkjet Prints on Canvas, variable dimensions
2023
The title of this series, Conjuring Moments, comes from Black feminist scholar, Kameelah L. Martin’s writing on “conjure feminism,” a theory that centers Black women and our relationships with African spirituality and ancestral legacies. Martin defines a “conjuring moment” as the creative application of Black women’s ancient intellectual traditions and “an ‘identifiable point in the text where conjuring or African-derived ceremonial practices occur and advance the narrative action.’” In my art practice, I find as I contemplate my reflection in the emerging imagery I create, at times, I sense guardian spirits dancing with me in the creative process. My studio is a room that becomes a womb for visioning. My artmaking is about channeling spirit and reaching into the void to create something meaningful. When creating visual art, I feel that I am being guided as a vessel for spiritual communication. Many times, in my creative work that directly involves the hand, I find myself in a somatically driven, visual conversation with spiritual energies beyond my conscious awareness. In these iconographies of transcendence, I center Afro-Indigenous world views in the autoethnographic study for my doctoral dissertation.