During the rainy season in California, I undertook a series of field-based experiments in mushroom foraging, guided by an intention to collaborate with the forest’s cycles of decay and regeneration. The process of creating spore prints—placing mushrooms on Japanese washi paper and allowing them to release their spores—became a durational study in emergent form and organic mark-making. Over time, these prints accumulated traces of life and decomposition: maggots, soil, and fungal residue layered into compositions that evoked ocular forms—unintended but potent visual metaphors for ancestral witnessing and presence.

This body of work evolved into a collage-based inquiry into visibility and lineage. By integrating magazine cut-outs of eyes from portraits of artists of color, I sought to recontextualize representation and pay homage to those whose creative and cultural labor sustains collective imagination. These gestures reflect an ethos grounded in ubuntu—the African humanist philosophy asserting relational identity: “I am because you are.”

My interdisciplinary practice engages with the poetics of place, often manifesting as site-specific works that respond quickly and intuitively to local materials, histories, and ecologies. Created within compressed timelines, these works emerge through sensitivity rather than imposition—articulating what is already present but often overlooked.

Rooted in somatic and ancestral awareness, my work embraces the mycelial logic of mutual interdependence. As living beings, we are not separate from the systems that support us; we are extensions of them—biological, spiritual, and cosmological. In time, we too return to the soil, completing the cycle.