Being Belonging AND GRACE

Being, Belonging and Grace

2018, charcoal on parchment paper attached with earth magnets to MDF panels substrates with rust patina

“Lurch’s aesthetic decisions visually gesture blackness as a location of entanglement, one that captures brief moments of happiness—relief, actually—and nests them within the broader context of racial violence, colonialism, and extraction.” - Katherine McKittrick

These 5 drawings, titled Being, Belonging and Grace, bring the indelible presence and sense of belonging on the land into view.

Charcoal sketched forms, map spaces of habitation, express movement and emotion, allowing us to know this presence as active. The figures embody a simple yet complex state of grace ,at leisure, at play, and in everyday living, and simultaneously counter fixed notions of Blackness, while calling attention to the specificity of race. The figures hold double-coded poses— an example can be seen in the bold back flip which echoes the Akan idea of Sankofa, (going back to retrieve history), glimpsing the subject in those moments without contestation. while expressing a joyful release toward freedom.