“Tree of Life is a personal piece inspired by Mexican folk art, mango trees from Sri Lanka and my own boredom with the typical representations of the feminine nude in art. It’s a seamless pattern created for a wallpaper backdrop for We Are Not Alone, my solo show in Brooklyn in 2019. I was thinking about the effects of isolation and who gets de ned as the ‘other’ when the demographics of the world would tell a different story. The wallpaper was awe-inspiring in person as it covered a massive 30-by-16-foot wall, and each tile of the pattern was 50-by-90 inches. The women are isolated, but we can see how they are connected to each other by the tree. The piece explores the concept of our private sense of self, while the paintings hung on the wallpaper explored the social performance of identity we do in public.”