Gingy Fly, 2025
120mm

“He took a strong nail and a hammer with him and drove a nail into the tree up to the head with three strokes, dropped the hammer and walked away rapidly without looking back.” - Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston

Gingy fly (gin-gee fly), meaning fruit fly, worm or maggot in Jamaican etymology. Thinking through the material history and material function of afro-diasporic yards, the photographs comprise of various gestural approaches to tree stubs and barks as a form of sculpture and mark making. Recreating a structure found in my family yard growing up through found wood, twigs and vines or incorporating months long decayed banana skins are used as a means to create gingy fly offspring. 

Recenetly after spending my time feeling an onotological affinity toward trees, particulalry the space between the ground and the tree bark, i felt a desire in wanting to become them and feeling an emotional resemblance.  I wanted to think of how witnessing would feel like through the existence of a tree and its bark in particular. 

I am also interested in how trees have witnnessed how humans use them for spiritual purposes. What some kind of non-meaning, as in, ideas which derive of non empirical and systematic modes of making, constitute the agentive act of ritual. Trees offer such approaches of thinking for me. They have an extensive history of being utilised and imbued with purposes of human votives and with spiritual approaches to redeem ones life through a mediation between humans and God.