These pieces, from the installation In Fertile Shadows, draw on histories of plants and the tropics as a starting point to examine the complexity of origin stories and histories of displacement—particularly the history of banana plants and the social, economic, and political upheaval surrounding them. Cultivating bananas through bouts of disease has left plots of barren soil in the tropics. At the same time the modern banana was propagated, J. Marion Sims conducted painful surgical experiments on enslaved women’s reproductive organs. These simultaneous events led directly to the ubiquitous modern banana and the modern gynecological experience.

In Fertile Shadows looks at the infertility of the ground and Black left in the wake of experimentation and crop cultivation, and the histories whose shadows provide the foundation of our modern experiences. Hidden amongst the work’s foliage are female figures. Thinking about invisibility as a circumstance and a strategy, hiding the figures protects them, at least temporarily, from the audience's gaze, gaining an upper hand and turning the viewer simultaneously into a voyeur and the viewed.