The Altarpiece Series
The Altarpiece series layers my original photography with found vernacular photos, maps, and antique book pages roughly torn and collaged onto birch panel, finished with cold wax medium and encaustic, then mended with gold leaf, to honor ancestral lives shattered by slavery and painstakingly rebuilt during The Great Migration. Since unearthing the unholy legacy of slave ownership while researching the roots of my family tree, I have created multiple stages of this series to process this country’s brutal past and my own role in ending generational patterns.
The work brings together many overlapping cultural practices that strive for ancestral healing. Each piece is deliberately torn and imperfectly-mended with gold leaf in the method of Japanese Kintsugi; the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, emphasizing the history and imperfections of the object rather than concealing them. The use of Chinese golden joss paper is also symbolic; these bamboo papers are traditionally burned in funeral practices as an act of ancestor reverence to ensure that the spirit of the deceased has sufficient means in the afterlife. The ancestor is further adorned in linen and lace- scraps of textiles salvaged from a dressmaker to clothe them for the next part of their journey.
The elements surrounding and bleeding through the central figure evoke the iconography of an ancient Byzantine altarpiece. These icons gave visual form to complex theological concepts such as the sacrifice of the Saint, here embodied as an African American Woman, and how she suffered and continues to be sacrificed for our sins. Historically, altarpieces served an important teaching function in an uneducated society; lessons sorely needed now when the truth of racial injustice is still being erased from history and the stories of who we are remain untold.