​The structures, portraits, and rituals I create express a yearning to reconnect ancestral ties. My work explores authenticity and appropriation in those ties, and how my desire for an unbroken line runs through all of it. What I desire, however, does not exist. Severance is baked into my blood as a Black american, and the gap between knowing and not knowing can never truly be filled. But acceptance seals the frayed thread, and the creation of my own rites begins another.