Paper Work
Home Finds Me
2025
20 inches x 14 inches
handmade snake plant paper and yarn
This is a small scale model for the 4 foot by 8 foot pieces that I will be making for a forthcoming work titles, Harvest Moon Baby. Within the Harvest Moon Baby installations the 4’ x 8’ maps will be hung from the ceiling to act as walls or a setting for the rest of the installation.
Materially and aesthetically this single sheet book traces my personal cultural geographies. I made the paper and yarn from snake plants that I foraged in Miami’s urban core. Snake plants are indigenous to a region that includes Yorubaland. Like the snake plant, my dad migrated to the US from there. The visual motifs and layout of this book directly reference a textile based Yoruba storytelling tradition called adire. In an adire cloth each square of the motif has a name & meaning. Together all of the squares and their arrangement in relation to one another also has its own additional meaning. Women wear them as clothing and for those who are fluent in Yoruba culture and traditions adire communicate complex information about the wearer’s present emotional state, social status, and more. Adire typically depict aspects of Yoruba daily life, folklore, and proverbs.For this piece I chose motifs, particularly plants and figures of speech, that are also common to Miami.
I used a single sheet binding to make this book because I wanted it to be able to fold out flat, like a piece of adire cloth. I also wanted it to function as a book to underscore the storytelling function of adire. In the US we appreciate the beauty of textiles without having the cultural context to understand textiles as literal texts that convey multilayered messages when situated within their communities of origin.