Living Systems
These bodies of work trace an evolving practice shaped by travel, inheritance, labor, public gesture, and material memory.
Created across studio, residency, and lived experience, each series functions as its own ecosystem — exploring how objects, symbols, and repeated actions carry meaning through time. Organized by body of work rather than chronology, this archive reflects the ways my practice expands across painting, sculpture, intervention, performance, and collected material.
What connects them is not medium, but relationship: to place, to lineage, to repetition, and to the marks we leave behind
WARD: Marks for Living
Color / Symbol / Colombia / Graffiti Language
A symbolic figure rooted in lineage, memory, and color. Developed during residency in Colombia, named after my Grandfather Rainey Ward King
WARD functions as an inherited visual language influenced by public mark-making, playful abstraction, and emotional architecture.
Inheritance in Bloom:
Residual Structures
Laser Engraved Waste Wood
These 21 works were created from discarded wood remnants sourced from other artists’ studios and fabrication waste. These works explore inheritance through absence, residue, and repurposed labor. Laser engraving becomes a form of drawing into material already marked by previous use.
Inspired by my grandfather, Ronald Bailey, and his exceptional carpentry and craftsmanship.
This series deepens Inheritance in Bloom by shifting from memory as image to memory embedded within surface.
Done in partnership with Makers Medellin of Medellin, Colombia
. Field Markers
Tagged Rocks / Trash Cans / Interventions Across Colombia
Field Markers is an ongoing site-responsive intervention using found ceramics, stones, tagged surfaces, and discarded materials placed back into public space.
Rather than creating ownership, these gestures function as temporary offerings — quiet acts of marking, care, and ecological presence.
This work exists between sculpture, ritual, public intervention, and environmental conversation.
Domino Studies
Performance / Memory / Social Sculpture
Rooted in childhood ritual and inherited memory, Domino Studies explores play as performance and connection.
Using dominoes carried from family history, the work investigates repetition, gesture, incarceration, language, and chance encounters.
The project expands through photography, video, social participation, digital renderings, and sculptural translation.
Shirt Off My Back
Exchange / Vulnerability / Gift Economy
During residency, I began giving away shirts I had worn — garments embedded with memory, sweat, travel, and identity.
Each exchange becomes both documentation and disappearance.
The work asks:
What does it mean to give away something that has shaped your body?
The series explores intimacy, labor, generosity, migration, and personal archive.
Thank you for spending time with this work.
These series are not separate projects, but connected gestures — traces of movement, memory, labor, and place.
Each body of work carries a different language, yet all are rooted in the same questions:
what we inherit, what we carry, and how we leave marks behind.
Whether you arrived here through curiosity, connection, collecting, or shared experience, thank you for becoming part of the story. Your presence allows the work to continue beyond the studio — into conversation, into memory, and into the lives of others.