In short, this show is about growth, pain, and love.
mothership in Malvern, is an homage to my late grandmother’s home in Malvern, Arkansas. Most will not know of Malvern, making it akin to a planet you’ve never heard of.
The house was built c. 1950 by my mother’s grandfather and my father’s father. My late grandfather worked at a brickyard.
When my parents divorced, my grandmother’s home became a place for my sister and I to escape them both. I felt free at my granny’s house. The three of us would sleep together in the same bed. My grandmother’s home felt like a vehicle or portal into another world – a mothership. One where I could be Black, femme, Southern, and ultimately boundless.
As I’ve grown older, I have felt more and more placeless, no matter where I physically reside. I know I am not alone in this feeling. We wonder who we are and what we will be. What are we, actually? I feel that I have departed from the mothership, and landed in the year 2022 in the United States of America. I am not nostalgic. I do not long to return to where I came from. I only want to know my origin point. To start from zero, zero and go from there. To know my origin point is to know myself.
The process of making these works gave me that chance, or at the very least, to see myself in the form of naked honesty. I am neither this nor that, but all of it, simultaneously and all at once.
