It’s so exciting to share my sculptural debut, [murmur] at my MFA thesis show at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. It’s been 2 years of challenge and sheer risk taking. I hope you have time to check it out. ______________________ Copy from curator, Claire Frost: Thinking and making through the lens of her experience as a member of the African diaspora who has continued to relocate throughout her adult life, Deeman explores the attendant sense of dislocation, as well as inherited or found roots, in her recent work. As a first-generation Black British person, her maternal family moved from Jamaica to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as part of the Windrush Generation. In 2020, and in the depths of the pandemic, Deeman migrated her art practice between the Bay area and Seattle, and there began cultivating native and diasporic plants that connect her to the many lands of her heritage. From this garden, Deeman harvested a single okra pod in the summer of 2021. Native to West Africa and transported with enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage to the Caribbean and then the United States, the plant was able to grow in the Pacific Northwest during the region’s hottest summer on record. For [murmur], Deeman produced hundreds of okra pods, modeled from the one that grew in her garden. Printed from iridescent plastic and suspended in a chromatic gradient wave, the vegetable is transformed from something nourishing and impermanent into an archivable form whose shifting colors reference queer and diasporic ways of being. Beneath the pods rests an ambiguous plexi-glass structure formed by heat and molded by Deeman’s hand and body. The transparent plane undulates and reflects the forms and colors of the okra, suggesting both water and land, movement and stasis. Glowing and changing as the viewer circulates around it, [murmur] indexes the circumstances of migration, climate, and culture that supported this particular okra pod's growth, while also proposing a limitless space for Black diasporic identity. @ucberkeley_artpractice @bampfa #ericadeeman