The Language of Mapping.

In February 2026, I was selected for Art on the Block NYC’s Art and Engagement Fellowship. I expected to spend several months thinking about the public engagement of my studio practice.

At the time, I had recently begun facilitating heritage workshops and African language reading sessions for children under ten. The fellowship seemed like an opportunity to deepen how I was thinking about that work.

Over several months, the fellowship brought together museum educators, curators, exhibition designers and artists to consider how works of art are encountered, interpreted and shared. Our conversations culminated in the exhibition The Language of the Land: Mapmaking and Meaningmaking.

Conventionally, maps help us navigate geography. They locate rivers, roads, borders and settlements. They tell us where things are. The exhibition invited us to reconsider what a map can be. It proposed something broader; that maps can also construct meaning.

I left with a different question. What if mapping is less about describing places than revealing relationships?

A river is meaningful because of the landscape it shapes.

A road because of the communities it connects.

A border because of the histories it divides.

Even our most conventional maps are not simply collections of objects. They are records of relationships.

Perhaps that has always been the language of mapping.

The works I created for the exhibition continued my exploration of inherited patterns, identity and personhood. At first glance they seem far removed from the landscapes that inspired the exhibition. There are no coastlines or topographical markers. No obvious references to geography.

Yet they, too, are maps. Not of places but of relationships. Relationships between memory and identity, or the inherited ways of seeing and the people we become. Between what is passed down and what is made new.

The exhibition gave me a language for recognising something that had already been present in my work. It also led me somewhere I hadn’t expected.

Back to my family.

One of the practices I associate most closely with my grandmother is the mixing of herbs for medicinal purposes. She would also mix raw shea butter with oils and fragrance. At the time, I could not have explained why it mattered. It was simply something she did.

Years later, I watched my father continue the practice as an act of care for himself and for us.

His sister continues it as well. She is a nurse, and I sometimes wonder whether the consciousness she inherited from her mother found another language in her profession.

My father’s curiosity took him to biochemistry. Looking back, I wonder if the degree followed questions he had already begun asking long before he entered a university. Science gave him one language for understanding living systems. The practices he inherited from his mother belonged to another.

One generation down, My cousins have inherited that same curiosity in different ways, finding their own ways to preserve knowledge of traditional plant remedies.

My sister’s relationship with living materials expresses itself differently. She has an extraordinary sensitivity to fresh ingredients, transforming them through cooking with an intuition that is difficult to teach.

For years, I understood these as separate stories.Now I see them as different expressions of the same inheritance.

Not an inheritance of recipes or remedies or even professions. An inheritance of ways of relating to the world around us.

The practices evolved but the questions remained.

That, I think, is how living systems endure. They do not preserve themselves by resisting change. They persist by adapting, translating themselves into forms that remain meaningful in a different time, a different place, or a different life.

Mapping, I think works the same way.

We often imagine maps as static documents that describe an unchanging world. But the worlds that matter most are alive.

Families migrate. Languages evolve. Recipes are adapted. Stories acquire new meanings. The things we inherit rarely survive by remaining unchanged. They endure because each generation interprets them anew, carrying forward what matters while allowing its expression to evolve. Perhaps maps should be understood the same way. The most enduring maps are not the ones that resist change, but the ones that help us navigate it.

I have begun to see my own work through that lens.

A few months later, while volunteering with The Black Forest project during the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, I found myself returning to many of the same questions. On the surface, the work was about plants. Underneath it, I began to recognise something much broader: relationships between people and living systems, and the ways knowledge is carried through them.

For a long time, I thought these were new questions, now I think they are old questions. Questions I inherited long before I had the language to ask them.

Perhaps every generation inherits a map. The work is learning how to read it.