My interdisciplinary practice explores identity, interpersonal relationships, haptic care, home, the self, and the body. Through reclaiming and reshaping flesh, I examine the condition of Black, queer, and trans bodies in civil society–how we grieve, how we labor, how we live, how we love. Using the language of authors like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Christina Sharpe, I am attempting to carve out space–in institutions, academia, places built on the backs of but not for people like me–and occupy them not in opposition but in subversion. I am unable to escape the institution or the world writ large, but I find refuge in its basements, its dance floors, its house parties; the community found in the cut. I am always in motion, between and beyond establishments, and my work maintains the continuous project of Undercommons living and loving within by remaining elusive, slippery, “in but not of”.

Rather than being confined by the limitations of one medium, I utilize digital media, ceramics, drawing, and ritual to build worlds, harnessing the senses to immerse viewers into the spaces I am making and unmaking. My work straddles the line between that which is grotesque and that which is tender, a line I walk everyday in the world. My work is meant to urge you beyond the boundary and feel something you may not want to. To touch that which is gnarled and mangled, to see (feel) the nature of being in a world that does not want you to be. I see my work as a process of interrogation–of ‘study’–and one that is not only never-ending, but necessarily communal. My work aims to dismantle the ‘white cube’ and encourage interaction and speculation, and requires others to engage; to feel with others, to be with others, to rub against others. It is an earnest investigation into Black and queer past, present, and future, and always hopes for those who enter to never really exit–to always be escaping, evading, and emerging.

-TN