I explore how memory is held within our bodies, objects, and physical structures. Sifting through my lived experience as an Ethiopian-American artist, I work to create spaces for tending to our collective memory. The process of remembering is both an act of archiving and survival. To remember is to preserve. I make installations that encourage slow walking, softness, and grounding while also being a poetic space of questioning, grieving, and witnessing. This creates a place where our collective memories–often impacted by colonial and imperial violence–are tended to with care and intention.

Using translucent and opaque textiles, clay, and collected organic materials such as fruit skins, seeds, and shells, I draw from my background in collage and printmaking to render compositions that waver between the thresholds of 2D and 3D. I leverage the varying opacities created by layering translucent fabrics to mimic the brief moments of clarity in the otherwise ambiguous endeavor of remembering. 

I form clay jugs as echoes of the plastic water vessels found in every home in my childhood neighborhood, a constant reminder of the presence of foreign aid organizations and their politics of poverty. These jugs are icons of colonialism, climate injustice, and aid politics. Remaking them with red clay is an effort to reconnect with the soil, to merge the human-made and mass-produced. I create an emptiness where something was once held, depriving them of their purpose. My installations are not altars to perfect memories, but transient spaces in which to reconcile the imperfectness of recalling the past with the present and future.