Where the Sun Splits Open(A Diasporic Hymn)
Solo Art Exhibition at Bx Arts Factory
Where the Sun Splits Open: A Diasporic Hymn, unfolded in three movements: The Lineage, Fragments of Self and the Blooming. Working across poetry, audio, photographs, and digital and handmade collage, the installation gathered memory through multiple forms. It traced a life shaped by migration, absence, and devotion asking, “how do we remember ourselves when history scatters the record?”
The Lineage traces three generations of women leaving Barbados with the same fragile faith that life will get better. The altar represents the beginning. My homeland in Barbados. The yellow and blue of the digital artwork is a homage to my homeland colors. The flowers against blood, symbolizes innocence pressed into familial bond but also rupture. The ink stains and splatter represents an invisible force that cannot be contained, intergenerational trauma. It simply repeats and reshapes itself as the lineage moves forward. Grandma’s missing face speaks to erasure and a self never allowed in its fullness, while Mum’s emerging features carry the weight of survival and responsibility. Kerry-Anne appears small but mighty, fully embodied, emerging as the intergenerational curse breaker.
This work understands diaspora not only as departure, but as transmission. Before a child is born, the biological traces of three generations already share the same bodily environment, linking grandmother, mother, and child within a single lineage of inheritance (Wolynn, 2016). Unresolved grief and survival strategies travel forward into America, where belonging remains uncertain. The Lineage makes this visible by the way the blood and roots move across the bodies, stitching grandmother, mother, and child into one living archive showing how what was never resolved does not disappear at migration, but travel intact. What arrives in America is unfinished wounds, quietly shaping what the self must later learn to carry in pieces.
Wolynn, M. It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Viking, 2016.
This work understands diaspora not only as departure, but as transmission. Before a child is born, the biological traces of three generations already share the same bodily environment, linking grandmother, mother, and child within a single lineage of inheritance (Wolynn, 2016). Unresolved grief and survival strategies travel forward into America, where belonging remains uncertain. The Lineage makes this visible by the way the blood and roots move across the bodies, stitching grandmother, mother, and child into one living archive showing how what was never resolved does not disappear at migration, but travel intact. What arrives in America is unfinished wounds, quietly shaping what the self must later learn to carry in pieces.
Wolynn, M. It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Viking, 2016.
Psychological research defines trauma not by what happened, but by how experience is stored when safety, agency, and meaning are disrupted, often resulting in memory held through fragments, images, objects, and bodily sensation rather than a linear narrative (van der Kolk, 2014).
Fragments of Self centers a figure tethered to objects and documents drawn from memory, some emerging as tools of survival and others surfacing during moments of emotional activation (triggers). While most objects appear in childhood and adolescence, memory shifts in adulthood from objects into documents. Objects hold memory when you cannot speak for yourself; documents hold memory when you are required to. Overall, these materials do not simply show the past but explain it, by revealing how the body becomes many selves to survive. Acknowledging these experiences opens the first pathway toward healing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Fragments of Self centers a figure tethered to objects and documents drawn from memory, some emerging as tools of survival and others surfacing during moments of emotional activation (triggers). While most objects appear in childhood and adolescence, memory shifts in adulthood from objects into documents. Objects hold memory when you cannot speak for yourself; documents hold memory when you are required to. Overall, these materials do not simply show the past but explain it, by revealing how the body becomes many selves to survive. Acknowledging these experiences opens the first pathway toward healing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
The Blooming gathers AI-collaborative digital collages of Kay Poema and her two sons. Each work begins with a photograph she took, moves through AI as photoshop, and returns to the hand through collage. This layered process mirrors healing as integration. Ink, color, and texture still carry history, yet they no longer fracture the figure. The face remains with the body, centered and intact.
Surrounding these works are the words grief, shame, regret, anxiety, and fear. This is the act of naming. As described in The Developing Mind by Siegel (2012), healing is an integrative process in which unspoken experience becomes conscious and emotionally held, allowing patterns to transform rather than repeat. In this sense, what once lived unnamed in the body is brought into language and placed in relation to the image. Naming loosens the grip of repetition and allows emotion to be seen, held, and metabolized rather than unconsciously passed forward.
Blooming is not about becoming a new self, or forgetting where one comes from. It focuses on tending the soil differently. The roots remain, but have space to flower into a lineage that chooses what it will pass on.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Surrounding these works are the words grief, shame, regret, anxiety, and fear. This is the act of naming. As described in The Developing Mind by Siegel (2012), healing is an integrative process in which unspoken experience becomes conscious and emotionally held, allowing patterns to transform rather than repeat. In this sense, what once lived unnamed in the body is brought into language and placed in relation to the image. Naming loosens the grip of repetition and allows emotion to be seen, held, and metabolized rather than unconsciously passed forward.
Blooming is not about becoming a new self, or forgetting where one comes from. It focuses on tending the soil differently. The roots remain, but have space to flower into a lineage that chooses what it will pass on.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
What People Are Saying About
Where the Sun Splits Open
(A Diasporic Hymn)
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