Her art gives a renewed perspective to the black women who have often been fetishised or dehumanised. Her work seeks to honour black women’s anger while refuting the stereotype of the angry black woman, and the traditional racialised white gaze. But the work also allows for the conflicting reality of how beauty and terror, vulnerability and power can seamlessly overlap in narratives.
The way anger may be tolerated and even encouraged seems connected to who is getting angry, across gender, racial and status divides. Girls and women over the ages have been conditioned to think about their anger as inappropriate: as hysteria, as madness, as problematic. The result has been a tendency to repress, question or feel guilty about our anger, but also to be punished for it in ways that range from the mundane to the horrific. Yet sometimes recognising and owning anger is what awakens women to a consciousness that can lead to new agency.
