Hippo Artz

Super Burdened

30 x 24 x 1.5"

Acrylic Paint on Stretched Canvas

$4000

Small figures crowd her torso, loved ones whose needs she carries. Passed from mother to daughter, her caregiving is expected, her generosity taken for granted. She holds the family together but has little room for herself. Who nourishes the woman everyone relies on?

Artist's Statement:

My work explores internal landscapes shaped by pressure, expectation, and endurance. I am interested in the way pressure accumulates; how subtle shifts compound until what appears stable begins to strain, fracture, or transform. Each piece maps a psychological terrain that is felt before it is explained.

I center Black women within emotional and psychological spaces that move between surreal imagery and intimate moments. My figures resist resolution. They remain present, contradictory, and aware, holding tension between vulnerability and control.

Color and form function psychologically rather than descriptively. Distortion, repetition, altered anatomy, and fragmentation allow what is carried silently to surface. I interrogate expectation as structure, strength as obligation, and composure as performance. Through saturated color and fractured form, I make visible burden, surveillance, endurance, and the forces that reshape the body from within and without.

Rather than resolving that tension, my paintings remain inside it so that the strain, rupture, transformation, and ongoing negotiation between holding, breaking, and becoming.