Through a multidisciplinary approach that combines practice-based studio work, archival research, and critical analysis, I investigate how grief operates both internally and externally; internally, shaping self-perception, memory, and cultural embodiment; externally, influencing intergenerational relationships, state-imposed identity, and community. This research is conducted through oil painting and mixed archival media, using personal images drawn from family and moments brought together by community. These techniques function as a way to reframe my position within the collaged imagery. By inserting myself indirectly through obscure shadows, floral forms, and silhouettes I address and reveal the complexity of cultural loss without relying on overt cultural symbolism. This approach produces personal knowledge about how loss and grief persist even when they remain unseen. Moreover, this body of work examines my positionality in understanding the diasporic wound as a nonphysical condition.
With reference from the work of other artists navigating similar trajectories alongside my own practice, I will confront diasporic grief not as remnants of the past, but as an active force that informs the present. By this, my goal is to reveal the unstable and unresolved shaping of identity under diasporic contexts. Using the critical lens of scholarly evidence by Judith Butler, Avery Gordon and Stuart Hall, I examine the dissonance of cultural memory; what is lost through immigration, what is unconsciously preserved, and what can be recaptured. Additionally, in my exploration of diasporic experience, this thesis will investigate the Western colonial and postcolonial perspective of Africa as a methodology to challenge the ways the West has impacted African diasporic experiences and perspectives. My engagement to situate diaspora within histories of colonial power and displacement is necessary to resist narratives that misconstrue African identity and refuse these assumptions through artistic innovation. This research deeply excavates the tension between personal and collective identity, examining how familial ties shift across generations and how feelings of guilt and responsibility persist in the aftermath of cultural displacement and political divide. I conclude by asking myself, how do you reclaim a culture that your parents had to leave behind? How do you reconnect with the roots that were grown in another soil?