Continuing my experiments with what i am calling the Madou technique, composed this image using sand, string, Ugandan bark cloth, printed cloth, paper, wood and acrylic paint. I wasn’t working with any idea more direct than the sense I got from Madou’s work of things tied together, like the mask used by the disfigured character in David Lynch’s “Elephant Man” or the repaired skins of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. These associations led me to the inner lives of children affected by the brutal conflicts in countries like Sierra Leone, where an abundance of resources – such as diamonds – prized by the wealthy often breed instability in the nations where they are mined.

So this work began to kind of emerge out of the color palette and textures, which began as an technical effort to simply reproduce the eerie, tactile, delightful compositions of the Senegalese artist I know only as Madou.