WHEN I WAS SMALLER THAN MYSELF

“When I Was Smaller Than Myself” is a transmedia project examining how childhood rules and expectations shape Black girlhood into adulthood. Centering shared stories from Black women, the work traces how early instruction can become internalized as silence, restraint, and self-surveillance. Through interactive, spatial, and digital forms, the project invites viewers to confront inherited demands, reflect on what no longer serves them, and reframe those traces as material for growth, self-definition, and becoming. In collaboration with Jourdan Pridgen

Collective Trace

Medium 1: The Collective Trace functions as a data-visualization structure that translates personal responses into a organized graph. Each participant responds to a prompt using a color-coded bead, with each color representing an experience that first occurred to you. The bead overall symbolizes young Black girlhood; small and overlooked carrying all the weight.

Installation: 58" x 16"
Display: We need a table that is at least 78" L by 22" W. A museum info stand.

Medium 2

Medium 2: Living Archive is a digital interface that frames home as the first site of instruction. Through Black women’s biographies, childhood collage, and reflections on inherited household rules, it reveals how early expectations can linger within the body and mind. The work traces the distance between who they were told to be and who they are now choosing to become, truly in their own way.

Display: iPad mounted on the wall

Typographic Poem

Medium 3: The Typographic Poem is designed as an act of unfolding. From afar, bold words declare affirmation, refusal, and becoming, however up close, viewers discover the quieter rules beneath them. The inherited instructions that have governed our thinking from childhood into adulthood. By placing these layers in conversation, the work reveals that transformation begins not with erasure, but with recognizing what has shaped us and choosing what we will carry forward differently.

Installation: Digitally printed scrolls (2), 13’ x 3’