From Boston to Zimbabwe

I am a woman impoverished of freedom. This realization didn't come to me gradually - it hit with the force of relocation, of stepping outside the comfortable boundaries of American life into a world where the rules I'd internalized simply didn't apply.

When I moved to Zimbabwe in 2014, I thought I was following love. What I discovered was that I was actually embarking on the most profound artistic education of my life. Living between Boston and Harare has given me something invaluable: the distance necessary to see Western culture with fresh eyes, to recognize the constructed nature of what we take for granted as natural or inevitable.

The Shock of Displacement

Boston had been my artistic foundation. I'd completed my BFA at Rhode Island School of Design, where I learned to process personal trauma through systematic archival work. My senior project "Everything is Fine" involved creating an archive of 14,000 images to explore how trauma manifests in the body and mind. I thought I understood the relationship between personal experience and artistic practice.

Zimbabwe shattered that understanding.

Suddenly I was Muroora - new wife - navigating a cultural matrix as far removed from my urban American feminist identity as I could imagine. The word itself carries weight: new wives in Shona culture must prove their worth through years of matrimonial ceremonies, demonstrating their value to their husband's family. As a committed urbanite, scholar, and feminist, I found myself learning to run a commercial farm, master agricultural logistics, and operate within social structures that challenged every assumption I'd held about my own agency.

The disorientation was overwhelming. But disorientation, I learned, is where real art begins.

Distance as Artistic Tool

Living outside the protection of American infrastructure forced me to see how power actually operates. In Zimbabwe, the comfortable justifications of Western progress culture become transparent. When you're building a horticultural company from scratch, fighting to protect your land, navigating post-colonial realities daily, you can't maintain illusions about the benevolence of capitalist systems.

This distance from my cultural foundation became the key to my current work. When I began studying Renaissance art for my "Mythologies" series, I wasn't approaching it as a Westerner seeking to understand my own cultural heritage. I was examining it as someone who had lived outside Western systems, someone who had experienced firsthand how other ways of organizing society function.

The Renaissance masters who had once awed me with their technical brilliance suddenly revealed themselves differently. Their exclusion of women from artistic practice wasn't just historical curiosity - it was part of a systematic silencing that I could recognize because I'd learned to see cultural patterns from the outside.

The Muroora Series: Identity as Process

My 2017 exhibition "Muroora" marked the transition between processing personal displacement and developing tools for cultural analysis. Working with image transfers onto Zambia cloth, I was learning to transport visual elements from one context to another - the same methodology I now use with Renaissance fragments, but focused on immediate identity negotiation rather than historical reclamation.

The Zambia cloth itself embodied the cultural layering I was experiencing: originally Indonesian batik, popularized in Africa through Dutch trade, now worn by Zimbabwean women as everyday clothing. Every piece carried multiple cultural histories, just as I was learning to carry multiple identities simultaneously.

These works forced me to grapple with fundamental questions: What does it mean to remain yourself while becoming someone new? How do you honor your cultural foundation while adapting to radically different social expectations? The technical process of transferring images became a metaphor for the psychological work of cultural adaptation.

Ubuntu and Artistic Practice

Zimbabwe introduced me to Ubuntu philosophy - the understanding that "I am because we are." This wasn't abstract spiritual concept but lived reality. In agricultural communities where survival depends on cooperation, individualistic thinking becomes not just impractical but dangerous.

Ubuntu fundamentally challenged my Western-trained approach to artistic practice. American art education emphasizes individual expression, personal vision, unique voice. But what if art functioned differently? What if creativity was inherently collaborative, connected, relational?

This shift in understanding now informs how I work with Renaissance archives. I'm not imposing my personal vision on historical materials - I'm facilitating conversations between different forms of consciousness across time. The Renaissance masters, digital algorithms, and my own intuitive understanding become equal participants in creating something none of us could achieve alone.

The Revolution Begins in Awareness

Zimbabwe taught me that revolution doesn't require violence - it requires stepping boldly into awareness of our authentic capabilities. Watching communities organize through love and mutual support rather than competition and domination showed me what alternative social structures actually look like in practice.

This experience directly shapes my current Renaissance collages. When I create these massive works showing women in positions of cosmic authority, I'm not fantasizing about impossible futures. I'm documenting possibilities I've witnessed, ways of organizing human relationships that prioritize harmony over conquest.

From Personal to Universal

The progression from "Everything is Fine" through "Muroora" to "Mythologies" represents an expansion from personal healing to cultural intervention. But the methodology remains consistent: systematic archival work, pattern recognition across vast image collections, and the belief that recontextualizing visual materials can reveal hidden truths.

Living between cultures taught me that what we call "progress" often represents departure from more sustainable ways of being. The linear thinking that dominates Western culture - the assumption that newer is better, that technological advancement equals human advancement - becomes questionable when you've experienced different approaches to time, community, and relationship with the natural world.

Zimbabwe gave me permission to question everything. More importantly, it gave me the tools to transform that questioning into art that imagines alternatives.

The Artist as Cultural Translator

Now when I work with Renaissance imagery, I approach it as a cultural translator rather than an inheritor. I'm not trying to reclaim my artistic heritage - I'm examining it as historical artifact that reveals the constructed nature of cultural power.

This distance allows me to see patterns that might be invisible to artists working within Western systems. The systematic exclusion of women from artistic practice, the ways religious imagery reinforces patriarchal authority, the violence embedded in mythological narratives - all of this becomes visible when you're not invested in defending the culture that produced it.

Living between Boston and Harare continues to inform my practice. Each return to American cultural context makes the constructed nature of Western power structures more apparent. Each return to Zimbabwe reminds me that alternative ways of organizing human society aren't utopian dreams but lived realities.

My art exists in the space between these worlds, using the visual language of one culture to imagine the possibilities suppressed by its power structures. Cultural displacement, it turns out, was exactly the education I needed to become the artist capable of creating the revolution I envision.