DESERT WOMAN

Since my earliest childhood, I was obsessed with a real search for identity. American by birth and by heart, everything since my birth: segregation, the black ghetto of South Chicago where I lived, the Black Panther movement strongly implanted in my neighbourhood, the confinement of my career exclusively to the black milieu and even my family memory which stopped at my great-grandmother, a slave in the south of the United States, reminded me of my African-American status and the ignorance of my roots. A trip to the island of Gorée (where I couldn't set foot, by the way, because I was so overwhelmed by emotion) revealed this deep malaise that was denied, ignored and repressed in the depths of my personality. My meeting with Philippe - my husband, my muse - a Frenchman so integrated that he didn't know he was black (???) was the trigger. Since then my work has been unconsciously dictated by a research on blackness and on faces, in a way my signature: big lips, frizzy hair, imaginary references to tribal scenes, faces hidden in bodies - in paintings as well as in sculptures or photos -, research on light and the rendering of matter in the dark. "