MICHELE D'ACOSTA

In my early 20s when I began to express my personal experiences through poetry, I found myself in an autobiographical dilemma. I was yet to become socially aware and still had to become politically conscious of the Black diaspora which informed my artistic roots. I faltered when I realized that the Eurocentric linear narrative formula could never adequately express what I was feeling, and I searched for an artform to combine the diaphanous threads of my lost African Mother Tongue, my Eurocentric scholastic disciplines and my vivid childhood growing up in the British post-punk music era: a child under the influence of The Clash and The Sex Pistols and the clash of cultures. 

The versatile nature of abstraction allows me to collage, sample and reinterpret my connection to past and present: and the recalibration of old energies is what I'm endeavoring to do when I reimagine traumatic experiences into a positively charged context, with the purpose of creating an inclusive space to reappraise and re-evaluate what has been hidden away, that now can be rebirthed into the light.

I was 52 years old when I found my birth family. Up until that time, my family photo album was defined by my Black mother and father missing from the store of memories.  To fill the emotional hole, I drew faces of people in a constantly changing series of colors and patterns. With the recent addition of AI drawing tools to my art practice, I have made an imaginative leap into the future.