Citrus Skin Weighing on a Pear or Tear Shape

A gestating figure with porous, citrus skin nests among Areca palm fronds as a pieta between an exotic mother and her endemic habitat. Inspired by Caribbean tales about pregnancy, which claim that citrus cravings and nausea indicate the gender of a fetus, the title recalls Edward Kamau Brathwaite's "Mother Poem".

The work considers the culture of procreation in the Americas- a complicated historical, political, and geographic context wherein conquering the wild landscape, reproductive bodies, and indigenous societies stem from a colonial Eurocentric legacy. Inhabiting its endemic environment, the fertility votive is made by combining intimate ephemera and environmental waste cast into a slurry of domestic construction materials. Monuments to the fertile survivors of man-made and natural disasters, the Mother Mold effigy figures bear the burdens of internalized structural violence made in and of our bodies, our landscape and our movement. Cast palm trunk husks, braided palm fronds, air plants, floor resin, wall insulation foam, interior latex house paint, plastic funerary plants, dessicated tropical plants are emboldened by a tropical, pregnant figure to embody our collective refuse as a site for procreative refuge.

The work's title draws from "Mother Poem" a book and poem written by Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
"Flowered / dead river courses: dry causes / the leaves of the land eaten by tourists / my mother's vision blocked by bricks and cement blacks / leak of cool from the grass / from the glass of thirst / in her throat / and her children."