My multidisciplinary practice treats language as material and structure: constructed, protected, and selectively revealed. Grounded in architectural thinking, my work encompasses sculpture, coded text, moving image, sound, and works on paper, each serving as both archive and vessel. I explore how abstraction, ornament, and restraint can convey layered meaning, with subtle gestures expressing flamboyance through texture.
Fragments of the face serve as adaptable elements in my work, reflecting an early conceptual framework defining makeup as a tool for self-creation. This approach extends to organic materials such as mango skins, tamarind seeds, silicone, mussels shells, resin, and my face cast in plaster, blurring the lines between body and environment, softness and hardness, and visibility and erasure. These materials reference West African markets, rituals, and diasporic trade.
As a queer Senegalese Muslim woman, I navigate coded language and restricted access, where strategic vulnerability becomes a form of care. Central to my practice is The Maad Code, an invented alphabet derived from the maad fruit, which reimagines communication beyond colonial structures through Wolof proverbs and layered gestures. Engaging with African diasporic mythology, my work positions itself as a site of memory and survival, aiming to foster intimacy, protection, joy, and liberation through material hybridity and coded abstraction.