Vodouisant Pwen is a large-scale mixed media work built from the dismantled remains of two previous paintings. Cut, layered, and stitched back together, the canvas fragments form a face — mouth sewn, neck sewn, intentions knotted at the throat. Scattered across the surface are flowers, beads, bamboo, velvet ribbon, skull charms, and hand-inscribed wooden discs bearing the words live, emerge, will.

In Vodou tradition, a pwen is a charged object — assembled with specific materials, directed toward a purpose. The work borrows this framework to examine the rituals women have long practiced in hopes of affecting healing: in themselves, in the people they love, across generations. The face that emerges is simultaneously portrait and prayer, reliquary and attempt.

The materials carry their own history. Built from the bodies of prior work, the piece enacts a kind of transformation — old surfaces broken down and reassembled into something that holds new intention. Whether that intention reaches its destination remains, as it always has, an open question.

Vodouisant Pwen is part of a series of mixed media works that includes The Mending and Everything at Once.