Q: How and when did you start working with textiles?

A: Textiles have been a part of my life for pretty much my whole life. I've always been in a house full of fabric, full of thread, sewing machines, because my mother was a seamstress from well before I was born. She'd make matching outfits for all of us and also for herself. That's how I learned to sew. We learned to sew these doll clothes together, making them from socks and other materials we had around the house, and then moving into something more complicated. Every school in the Bahamas wears a school uniform. She made all my school uniforms. I'd help her with that too a little bit, like sewing on the buttons, putting on the hooks on the skirt. Those were really special moments for us. I felt like, "This is our connection. "

Q: How did growing up in the Bahamas affect the color patterns that you work with? And how and when did you start working with textiles?

A: For fabrics, my choice is always vibrance. I work with a lot of color. Being someone from the Caribbean, color is a part of life in a way that is hard to see or hard to experience in other places. In other cities, when you walk around, everyone's in all black. You probably will never have that moment in the Bahamas. People gravitate toward color. For me, that has been true in my work and my personal life, which the two are very intertwined. I work with a lot of florals in my fabrics as well. I've always been drawn to flowers, a very strong motif throughout my work, through the very different ways that we can communicate with flowers, what they might mean. Even the placement of them (is it upright or upside down? ) and what that might indicate for a portrait.

I think that it also is a connection to lineage and ancestry. For me, being a person from the Caribbean, being from the Bahamas, tracing back ancestry is difficult. The record-keeping only goes back so far. There's a history in the diaspora of enslavement and how being stolen and taken away has really broken down our ability to trace back where we've come from. Looking at images from hundreds of years ago, you can see the similarities in hairstyles. I can still see some of the same hairstyles, some of the same methods of hair care, which to me is showing that there's still this connection.

Q: What does it mean for you to be able to have Black women and girls, such as your sisters and friends, represented on the walls of galleries and museums?

A: I am making art for black people. I want my art to be seen by people who perhaps don't have a strong background in art. These textile portraits are my attempt at decolonizing portraiture. I'm approaching these portraits with an extremely high level of respect and reverence and a dedication to the person represented. I think that they can see that when they see the piece. It really is immortalizing someone through portraiture. I didn't know a lot about art. I didn't know any artists. My family was not a go-to-the-museum or art-gallery kind of family.