Line Shape Colors:  Motionless Movement

This body of work grows out of personal history, memory, and early experiences with religion. I grew up in Anniston, Alabama during the era of Governor George Wallace, in a family shaped by sharecropping roots in Georgia. My grandparents left Georgia searching for something better and eventually settled in Anniston. My mother, with only a third-grade education, began working at a young age and later moved my sisters and me to Dayton, Ohio, where my path toward art began. Living in Alabama introduced me to both the power and complexity of religion. I experienced the structure of belief through sermons, scripture, and the promise of reward and punishment. I learned about the joys of heaven and the suffering associated with hell, and how these ideas shaped behavior, hope, and fear. Those early teachings stayed with me and continued to influence how I think about faith and human experience. Years later, a question began to take shape. If so many people live their lives in pursuit of heaven, what would that place truly be like? Rather than imagining it as a static destination, I began to think of it as a space of freedom—a place where individuals could move, explore, and exist without restriction. God’s Playground grew from that idea. The works imagine heaven not as a place of stillness, but as an open, living environment shaped by possibility, movement, and release.