Angelique Scott

MFA Ceramics, 2025

My current body of work centers on Afro-diasporic kinship practices, focusing on hair, adornment, and cultural language. Specifically, I am exploring sacred spaces and objects within African-American domestic environments along the East Coast—from Brooklyn, NY, to South Carolina and Virginia—spanning from the 1990s to the present day. As a cultural worker, my goal is to preserve and highlight aspects of the Afro-diaspora. My studio practice embodies self and community preservation as a form of protest against harmful systems of violence, including capitalism, racism, and sexism. Influenced deeply by Africana womanism, the work draws from Afro-diasporic kinship practices, exploring the materiality of objects like indigo, cotton, and glass to reveal their historical ties to labor, commerce, and cultural resilience. I ask: How can these materials, given their social and historical significance, help us reimagine adornment beyond colonial, Eurocentric, and extractive narratives? Can these objects serve as vessels to honor ourselves and our ancestors, rooted in Afro-diasporic spiritual and sacred practices? Iconography such as bamboo earrings, braids, and the Sankofa symbol are woven throughout my work, functioning as both coded language and textural elements. Materials like gold, bronze, and patinas are used to model these objects as future artifacts—relics from the past that continue to be used in our ceremonies where we gather, prepare, reflect, and remember. The framework of the work engages with the philosophies of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s on Difference w/o Separability & The Entangled World, Simone Leigh’s reimagining the archive, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, waywardness, magical realism and Elizabeth Alexander’s The Black Interior - envisioning a space of our own.  In both my research and my work, I explore Afro-fractalism (or poly-temporality); a collapse of time including past, present, and future simultaneously, as a way of connection, healing, and possibility.