Folowing my 2024 exhibition in which I unpacked my artistic research and praxis around unraveling what I describe as a ‘colonial blueprint’, in this new body of work I consider where that unraveling has since taken me. What came out of that process was a journey back into deeply embodied modes of knowing, being, and doing, attuning to what Sylvia Wynter describes as ‘autopoietic being’. Where my previous work wrestled with a colonial blueprint and how to unravel or renegotiate my orientation to it, my new work seeks to attune to the rhythms of ‘aesthesis’ and ‘decolonial aesthesis’, whilst unravelling the Western canon of art and aesthetics present in my life and education. Taking my kitchen table - a place for me of communion and love - as one of my earliest sensory and creative connections to aesthesis, I have begun to create work that, in one way or another, connects to the labour of preparing food for others. Taking tablecloths that are dyed with food and mended; preparing and sharing beloved recipes such as 'tè al limone' and 'magwinya'; creating paintings with bread dough; baking picture frames out of bread; al of these works are acts of mending and of care. These are attempts towards a reparative act, which I do not think of as one that can ‘fix’ what was previously broken, cast aside, or othered. I do not think of repair as an action that can return something to its former, unbroken state. Rather I think of ‘repair’ as an act of mending, one that evidences the mending done, and in so doing, holds what was and builds on it something that can begin to breathe again.