In the Yoruba tradition, the oracle does not predict — it remembers. It speaks in the voice of those who came before, naming what the present has forgotten. Oracle & the Ancestors is a body of work made in that grammar: each piece a vessel through which lineage is asked to surface.
The forms begin as found wood — pallet boards, salvaged building remnants — sanded, scorched, and joined into oval planes that recall both shield and seed. From the surface emerges a figure: a hand, a head, a chest wrapped in cloth, sculpted in raw terracotta the color of Georgia clay. Below, the figure descends into root.
The roots are not metaphor. They are gathered from the artist's walks through Atlanta's pine and oak woodlands — the same soil where, across generations, his family has grown, fled, returned. Mounted to the work, they extend past the frame and onto the wall, casting shadow that reads as a second body. The piece refuses to stay contained.
Color enters the surface as quiet punctuation: a yellow rectangle, a stripe of cobalt, a notch of green. These are not abstractions. They are the chromatic vocabulary of West African textile and the marked surfaces of Kongo nkisi — small registrations of presence and protection.
The Oracle and the Conjurer