Artist statement (Courtesy of Sahara Clemons):

Echoes In The Deep Blue explores the chaos of young adulthood as a period of expansion, adventure, and disillusionment. It is also an inquiry about identity, mainly how I see myself as a Black woman and how I reconcile my internalized self-representation. “Echoes” refer to the ancestors I carry with me on this journey, while the “Deep Blue” reflects the paradoxically grounding effect of water. The works are a collage of memories, taking fragments from my youth, family archive, and travels. Combining and deconstructing these fragments, the series embodies themes of joy, sensuality, confusion, and pain. As a departure from previous work, I wanted to lean into the idea of abstraction and the intangible -creating spaces the subjects live in that are imaginative yet familiar. The making process was equally important as the final outcome; I painted more intuitively to retain the authenticity I wanted to accomplish with the series.

The pieces in this collection emerged during a tremendously liminal period, the cusp of adulthood, sexual discovery, and identity formation. As I began to think about moving into a new chapter of life, I became more curious about the past and legacies that birthed the moment I found myself in. I started looking at old family photographs, seeking lore and untold stories. These rituals and the concepts of youth, memory, moments of pause, and moments of bliss reverberate through the work. I asked myself what is home? What textures, textiles, and people cultivate a feeling of home? What exactly is Blackness?

A few months into making the series, I took a trip to Ghana, which significantly impacted the direction of the work. The experience was jarring yet expansive, chaotic yet profound, and my motivations behind the work evolved into wanting to articulate these intense juxtapositions in Ghana as they related to my initial investigations of lineage, home, spirituality, maturity, and groundedness.