"My art-based research relies on treating life experience as multiple, new knowledge creation and the importance of storytelling through the acknowledgment of ancestral knowledges. Using digital collage and film that mix realities I attempt to tell stories about ritual, hair braiding, symmetry, pattern and discipline. Stories about mothers and grandmothers, about monsters, about memory, about loss and longing. By othering the viewer, my work is a play on expectations and translations of racialized and migrant bodies. It recognizes the effects of assimilation and loss of culture within an immigrant experience and centers the body as a fragmented and hybrid archive of dualities. It calls for safe spaces of communal healing while creating avenues for new narratives and excluded voices to be realized. It makes note of oppressive structures and attempts to undo colonial damage. The eventual loss and longing felt by migrant bodies become the overarching themes, focal point and love language of my research and art practice."