Postcard, from the series Smells like Money is a project created in collaboration with my younger self. In the process of making these handmade collages, I sit with the version of myself who spent Saturday mornings in the hair salon getting her hair done, flipping through magazines filled with faces that reflected my own. I would move from publication to publication searching for the perfect hairstyle to timidly request from my god-sister, only to be gently turned down. Those magazines became more than entertainment. They were early glimpses into a world of beauty, glamour, and possibility, quietly shaping the way I imagined my own future.
As an adult, I return to those same publications with new eyes and a deeper understanding of what they offered me then. I pull clippings that ignite and excite the grown version of myself and use them to build scenes that reflect the visions of adulthood my younger self once held. Anchored by the faces of Black women from those same hair magazines and advertisements—the epitome of beauty, glamour, and luxury to me at the time—these collages recreate the worlds she dreamed of: lives of ease and abundance and a kind of grown womanhood that felt glamorous, powerful, and full of possibility.
