Nuri Patricia

Lives and works in Newark, NJ, USA

Artist statement

As an artist and poet, my practice explores diasporic Black queer experiences, using mythology and allegory to synthesize cultural anxieties, spirituality, and the psychedelic. My interdisciplinary process includes sculpture and performance but centers on multilayered oil paintings that investigate the political and psychic tension between freedom and constraint. Each painting emerges through an intricate process of layering concrete, oil paint, resin, crushed glass dust, and glass beads. My identity as the child of a Jamaican father raised in Callao, Peru, and an Irish American mother has deeply shaped my artistic vision. Born in Hudson, NY, and now dividing my time between New York City and London, I explore themes of diaspora and storytelling to trace my crossing heritages. My perspective as a mixed-race Black trans person living with disability has sharpened my awareness of how bodies face political and social barriers. Through art, I communicate my experiences and examine the limits of what is possible through magical thinking. Works draw from my body, Caribbean heritage, and past experiences with homelessness and survival sex work to create new mythologies. In each painting, I search for portals outside of Western history and its ideas of the human and of nature. These worlds unfold rhizomatically—a hermaphrodite mermaid, an urban subway turned shipwreck, the spectral afterlives of slavery and colonization—where myth becomes a psychic architecture for transformation....

Artwork