As a queer Senegalese-American artist, my practice engages strategies of coded language and restricted access. In contexts where queer identities are often erased or criminalized, opacity and abstraction become tools of protection as much as expression. Central to this investigation is The Maad Code, an alphabet I invented derived from the maad fruit (Saba senegalensis). Through this evolving system, I explore how ancestral knowledge, myth, and embodied gesture can form alternative structures of communication beyond colonial alphabets and archives.
Drawing on my diasporic experience, I find inspiration in African and African American histories, as well as mythological traditions that understand time as cyclical and expansive. These references allow my work to imagine archives that simultaneously hold care, secrecy, and resilience.
My multidisciplinary practice treats language as both material and structure: constructed, protected, and selectively revealed. With each piece functioning as both an archive and a vessel, my work encompasses layered, textural visual containers, including sculpture, language, moving image, sound, oil pastel drawings, and works on paper. Across these media, I explore how abstraction, ornament, and restraint can carry layered meaning, and how subtle gestures can communicate flamboyance through texture, color, and form.
Ultimately, my practice is rooted in the celebration and cultivation of queer liberation. Through material hybridity, coded abstraction, and portraiture, I aim to construct visual languages that honor memory while imagining futures in which queer identities are not only visible but protected, cherished, and free.