The story behind my first collection — identity, architecture, and what it means to be seen.
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When I started making art again — really making it, not just producing work to fill a shop — I didn't plan a collection. I planned a confrontation — with myself.. I needed to understand who I was before I could put anything meaningful into the world. And what came out of that process was Facial Evolution.
The face became my subject because it's the site of everything. It's where identity lives. It's what people read before they know you, what they project onto before they've heard your voice. As a Black woman of Jamaican heritage, born muslim, birthed and raised in South London — and navigating all that comes with that, including my faith — I've spent my life having my face, and everything it represents, read wrong.
"Growing up, I couldn't fit myself into a box. Society wants you to tick one category. But my experience never lived in one place — it lived in the overlap, in the tension, in the parts that didn't make immediate sense to other people."
Having to navigate that quietly, from a young age, shaped how I see identity. Not as a fixed thing. As something layered. Something built, particle by particle, like matter itself.
That's where the architecture came in.
My background is Interior Architecture. And when I started developing the visual language for this collection, I kept coming back to the way buildings are made — the way structures emerge from small, individual components that only make sense in relation to each other. Bricks. Atoms. Pixels. Pieces of a person. The mosaic style you see across Facial Evolution is that idea made visible: human faces rendered as fragmented compositions, dissolving at the edges, cohesive at the centre. The fragmentation isn't damage. It's construction.
"The fragmented yet cohesive composition reflects transformation and self-perception — exploring the tension between clarity and obscurity, structure and emotion."
I want to be honest about something else too. I'm a young artist. I'm still healing. Still learning. And this work is a direct reflection of that. Facial Evolution is not a finished statement — it's an ongoing process of putting into image the things I haven't always been able to put into words. The things I've carried. The things many of us carry. And knowing that these experiences are shared — that someone else will look at this work and feel seen — is part of what makes it worth making.
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FE1 · The First Series
An introduction. A woman. A beginning.
FE1 was where I started to understand what I was doing. The four pieces move through stages — from a single eye emerging from darkness, to a partial face forming, to features assembling themselves, to a face fully present and looking back at you. It wasn't planned that way at first. It revealed itself.
Each piece is built from the same mosaic language — irregular blocks of black, grey, cream and warm brown, with hand-rendered facial features breaking through. The contrast between the pixelated structure and the intimate precision of the drawn eye, the mouth, the nose — that tension is intentional. It asks: what do we see first? What do we allow ourselves to see? What do we overlook?
FE1 was my introductory. To myself, to this work, to the audience I hadn't met yet. It asked the question. FE2 began to answer it.
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FE2: Vol. 1 · The Second Series
The deeper truth. The shared experience.
If FE1 was asking who I am, FE2 is confronting what the world has done with that answer.
The first piece in this volume is a face in profile — features deliberately isolated and reassembled. An eye with long lashes, a prominent nose, full lips, an ear. Rendered against pure black, warm-toned, pixelated at the edges. It came from a specific, painful place: the experience of being a Black woman whose appearance is read before she is. Sexualised before understood. Features that were mocked for generations, then mimicked and profited from by others. The work doesn't explain that directly. It asks you to sit with a face that has been taken apart and look at what you see — and then ask yourself why you see it that way.
"The piece examines how Black women's features have been isolated, exaggerated, and misread — disrupting immediate recognition and encouraging viewers to reconsider what they think they see."
The second piece is the one that took the most out of me. Two faces — one screaming, raw and open, and beside it a second face, muted, monochrome, receding into grey. It's the visual truth of something Black women carry constantly: the gap between how we feel and how we're permitted to feel. The screaming face is not anger. It's release. It's depth. It's everything that has been compressed and dismissed under the label of "the angry Black woman" — a label designed to silence rather than understand. The grey figure beside her is not peace. It's erasure. It's the version of us the world prefers: quieter, smaller, less.
Placing them together is the statement. Both are real. Both are us. Neither is the whole story.
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Both FE1 and FE2 come from healing. From finally giving form to experiences I've held for a long time — experiences that, when I look around, I know I'm not alone in. That's what this series is. Not just my story. A mirror for anyone who has ever been layered, misread, boxed in, or unseen — and is still, quietly, working their way back to themselves.
I'm still in that process. This work is proof of it. And I'm not done yet.
But I want to be clear about something. This collection is not made for one ethnicity. The subject matter is specific — it has to be, because specificity is where truth lives — but shared experiences come from all walks of life. Whoever you are, however you come to this work, whatever it stirs in you — that response is valid. That's the point. I don't seek to make art that is rigidly defined by history or culture alone. This is now. And what comes next from me could be anything — dogs and cats, love and war, the mundane and the monumental. There are no barriers to what I'll create. The only rule is that it will always, without compromise, be authentic.