My initial idea when creating this piece, “ There’s Levels to This… “ was to show the struggles of growing up with various mental ailments. I was taking a class on child & adolescent psychology at the time and so, I wanted to visualize how those first 25 years of your life can affect your brain whether it’s through trauma, grief or other life lessons.

Each panel of fabric represents a period within your life and the individual inkblot tests within those panels represent one year of your brain’s development. And if you look closer within the piece, from left to right, you will see added layers of inkblots, stamping and gold leaf to represent those particular events that we hang on to that shape our mental health.

While working through this piece, I started experimenting with stamping using the textures and patterns of different black hairstyles which helped expand on this idea, but also put more of an emphasis on healing within the black community which is an overall theme within my work. I originally didn’t know how to connect the sections, but I knew I wanted to further this secondary idea of black hair and how it connects to our healing. The black rubber bands that are tied together between each panel helped me bring back that theme since those are the same rubber bands used within a lot of black hair styles. Regardless of this underlying idea, I feel everyone can relate to this subject matter and draw their own interpretations for the piece.

This piece took about 4 months to make.