Of Caribbean decent the daughter of an East Indian Muslim father who converted to Pentecostalism and a mixed heritage Catholic mother. Mine was a religious household full of commandments, prayers and bibles. I was forever wondering about miracles and transformation.

After we moved to New York City, I began questioning our adopted religion for its depiction and assessment of women, our adopted country for what seemed at times a mechanized existence, and our familial commitment to silences--as in one day my mother simply stopped living with us, but continued to arrive for a variety of banal daily events, checking under the lids of pots, checking behind my ears. Still, I longed for the stillness that conversion and belief promise.

My paintings of figurines bought at the local Botanica have been an attempt to explore the sacred and the silent and to try to get at a deeper understanding of what faith means to me.

In these paintings I combine observational painting with flattened space in order to suggest the stillness of the altar and inner space of contemplative experiences.

In many ways, painting has become my religion and my commitment to painting has amounted to a commitment to the unknown. I want to make images that express beauty, light, movement, vulnerability, unrest, malaise but most of all images that have the ability to move an individual from one place to another.