A featured piece in the Mother Musa collection, Today I Met the Mothers is a standing sculpture composed of hand-harvested banana fiber. Banana leaves were stripped to their midribs before being shaved, attached and hardened with various fiber stiffeners. Lines are held together with tension and industrial adhesive. The undulating silhouette, featuring three angular windows enclosed by a single antennae at the highest point of the sculpture, was arranged intuitively with guidance from the spirit of the banana plant.

Today I Met the Mothers was made possible in part by A Studio In the Woods, National Black Arts Festival and the bountiful lands of Georgia and Louisiana.

Process

Backstory

The 78-inch sculpture marks the start of a mythological map-making series, born through collaboration between myself, my ancestral guides and the spirit of the banana tree.

The imagery of these maps was long ago deposited into my eternal memory, with the purpose of being dug up during this particular era in time. 

The Mothers is the result of an 11-year quest, during which I lived through a sequence of initiations that unlocked compartments of my psyche where these cartographic memories are stored. The activations require full-bodied blends of long-term devotion and discipline, laughter and lightheartedness. 

The atypical maps are intended to stimulate aspects of peoples’ celestial selves, thus establishing and/or enriching lucidity through the lines of communication between one’s earthly persona and their highest intelligences.

Today I Met the Mothers, the first mythological map in the series, works overtime as

• a weapon to use against adversaries

• an instrument used to communicate with Gods

• a teacher of elemental powers with emphasis on water, air and fire