Cotton Flower

2024 – 2025

In my ongoing body of work, Cotton Flower, I employ an afrofuturist and ecowomanist framework to re-imagine the relationship between enslaved women and the land. In slave societies, power was constructed not only through race but also through gender. Enslaved women were exploited for their labor and capacity to sustain the workforce through childbirth. On cotton plantations, some enslaved women engaged in gendered acts of resistance, by ingesting the roots of cotton plants to prevent pregnancies and induce abortions. Establishing a parallel between the state-sanctioned reproductive violence committed against enslaved women and the instrumentalization of nature for resource extraction by colonial systems, Cotton Flower utilizes speculative storytelling to imagine an innate solidarity between enslaved women and the earth. The works in this series document the supernatural metamorphosis of the enslaved woman’s body as she ingests the cotton plant. By consuming the plant, she heals her body, communes with her spirit, and merges with the natural world that envelops, strengthens, and protects her. The enslaved woman physically becomes one with the land – sprouting the branches and blooms of the cotton plant and unfurling roots that stretch down into the depths of the earth. Throughout this metamorphosis, both the enslaved woman and the land transform – becoming a unified force that cannot be rooted out by the violence of slavery nor diminished by the commodification of capitalism.