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Whole Again, Live Performance, 2021

Performance summary: The artist stands in a pink pool, surrounded by dismembered body parts cast from African black soap. Over the course of 50 minutes, she gathers these scattered fragments, arranging them to be scored and slipped, a ceramicist’s technique, using a mixture of water, cowries, and osun (camwood). Using rudimentary tools, she attempts to mold and join these limbs and torsos directly beneath a constant source of running water within the pool. As she persists in her labor to unite the pieces into whole bodies, the very elements used to sustain them, the water and the friction of the process, cause the soap effigies to soften and collapse. She continues this cycle of construction and repair until the bodies undergo total dissolution, leaving only the remnants of the effort.

Conceptual Framework

Whole Again is a performance piece that explores the precarious concepts of love, ownership, service, and surrender. Drawing from a myriad of references, most significantly the Orisha Osun, the work functions as an investigation into the complexity of mending and restoration, particularly as they pertain to the endurance of Black pain.

This inquiry is enacted through the literal sculpting and reconstruction of the "Black body." By utilizing the pool’s water and basic tools to manipulate African black soap—a material traditionally composed of the ash of local plants and oils—the artist engages in a durational act of creation that is inherently tied to destruction.

The materiality of the soap, with its rich history and tactile properties, serves as both metaphor and metonymy. Through the rhythmic labor of washing, mending, restoring, and the inevitable, entropic deterioration of the soap effigy, the performance interrogates the nature of labor, the limits of care, and the enduring reality of damage.