Artist Statement: Clockwork Academy

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In this body of work, I imagine a school that history never recorded but should have: the Clockwork Academy for Girls, founded in 1888 at the height of the Industrial Revolution. I conceived the Academy as a sanctuary for young Black women, protégées of Benjamin Banneker who applied their intellect and creativity to the sciences, the arts, and the mechanics of time itself.

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My collages reanimate this imagined institution, drawing on archival aesthetics and layered construction to suggest blueprints, instruments, and inventions. By cutting and assembling fragments of paper from across the world, I echo the resourcefulness of the girls I depict, building telescopes from scraps, charting maps, or designing machines that challenge the very order of their era.

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I want to shine a light on the fact that during this period, we were the true artisans of the age- the botanists, the couturiers, the inventors, the craftsmen. Clockwork Academy attempts to make that visible, to insist on our place at the center of invention and imagination where history too often left us in the margins.

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Odessa, Isabell, and Lord Rascal are rooted in my desire to imagine Black childhood beyond the limits of the historical record. Set in 1892, each child represents a different kind of possibility: Isabell through curiosity and invention, Odessa through mystery and movement between worlds, and Lord Rascal through travel, ambition, and the promise of a larger life. Together, they allow me to explore the children who grew up in forward thinking Black communities like Mound Bayou. In this exploration. I was interested in the many minds that would grow up to create our Renaissance.

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The Clockmaker’s Assistant

In the shop, the clocks tick slowly while the street hums with life. Fredrick’s clock repair shop rests neatly on the corner of East Main St. Inside, Isabel thinks she’s learning to mend timepieces. She’ll soon discover otherwise. She does not yet know that hidden behind gears and a broken grandfather clock is a secret world of forbidden books, celestial maps and mathematics, and answers about time itself. 

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Lord Raskell

 

In Lord Raskell, a 12 year old boy stands at the beginning of a life he cannot yet imagine. It is 1892, and today’s interview will set him on a path toward becoming a Pullman porter. For generations of Black men, the railways offered more than a job. They opened doors. Through travel, he will collect knowledge, contacts, and a wider sense of the world, carrying those insights back to his community. What begins here as the poise of a sharply dressed boy becomes a life enlarged by movement, opportunity, and perspective. 

 

Odessa, Between Worlds

Odessa has been here before. She knows one world can sit beside another, and that time is not always as linear as we are taught to believe. She doesn’t need to explain what she has seen, nor does she need anyone else to believe it. She has traveled farther than the stories people tell and returned carrying a quiet understanding of what exists beyond the familiar. Each crossing has changed the way she sees the world she stands in now. She carries those other places with her.

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