Perhaps the most important moment in my college education occurred during a philosophy of women course, when I read the Sander Gilman essay in Race, Writing and Difference and discovered the story of Saartjie Baartman. Her story occupied me and my work for ten years. At the same time I began to study ceramics and became interested in African and Native American techniques and the ethnographic twilight zone in which African art exists. I saw parallels between the treatment of these objects and the treatment of the image of Black women, and specifically Black women's bodies, in art and culture. They play at least a dual role in western culture: exotic and aesthetically rich but simultaneously common and low. So as I began a series to pay homage to the life of Saartjie Baartman, my point of departure was the iconic African water pot.

I was also fascinated with what I guess you could call the aesthetics of imperialism, or maybe colonial aesthetics. I became attracted to the collision of African art and people with European colonialism in its various forms, producing natural history museums, world's fairs and freak shows. I saw that my obsession with these things was not just based on repulsion and horror but also attraction to their aesthetic products. I was not only interested in the freak object but the glass box in which it was preserved. The fantasy landscapes of the colonies produced at world's fairs, my father's dark hand holding a porcelain teacup.

When I made the vessels in homage to Saartjie Baartman I had varied concerns. I was interested in exploring the nature of freakiness. When did it begin? When did natural, organic growth become freakish or degenerate? When was a bud, nipple, or breast nurturing and when did it become aggressive and threatening? What is the nature of funk? What is so funky and excessive about Black women's bodies? What was the purpose of the dual role of being exotic and common?

In creating this work, I built an arena in which I could explore my own relationship to colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexuality issues in my life. I am a preacher's daughter. I was born in a parsonage to West Indian parents and raised in a fundamentalist Christian white church. My father was sent here from Jamaica to be a missionary. One of my earliest memories is of crying myself to sleep for a week because I didn't want to leave my body so that my soul could go to heaven. By the age of three I had already begun to fetishize Black women's bodies.

I eventually became very curious about the pleasures that the world had to offer: the erotic life from which I was being protected; the unclean, degenerate, wild, heathen past that had to be cleaned up with Christian ethics, bleach, straightening combs, and lots of discipline. This environment, the Christian idea that you are in the world but not of the world, and my father's Jamaican arrogance, all contributed to the feeling that I was a freak. They also gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted, as there was no particular community to which I felt allied. The information I got from African American studies and women's studies has given me a feeling of artistic license to explore these subjects, not in a vacuum, but while many others are considering these subjects as well. My work oftentimes feels like a dialogue. The information I learned and continue to learn as the result of women's studies scholarship is a direct support to my work.

My daughter, Zenobia, was born while I was working on this series. The first day I went out with my gorgeous new baby, who had milky white skin, a woman saw us and said "How old is that baby? That baby should be with its mother!" I lived in the progressive neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and had become quite complacent, so I was not prepared for this woman's comments and the assumptions behind them. It got worse. One day someone said "Look, it's a wet nurse!" Another day someone said it again. Finally a Black woman sat down next to me saying she just wanted me to know that I should be paid extra for that.

Once again, I had become a monstrosity. Alone, I was non-threatening. With Zenobia at my breast, I was a disgrace. Containment and how containers describe or conceal the reality within also became part of my work and inspired my Wet Nurse series. I began by creating small yam- or breast-shaped pieces that could save the information my own breasts had brought me until I was healed and better able to deal. I laid them into a 19th century baby carriage. For my next Wet Nurse piece I put more small clay objects in a 1950's carriage, reminding me of my mother and also of my grandmother, who was a baby nurse (albeit not a wet nurse) in the Fifties. These pieces depict more aggressive growing things. They are Black like me. With the third piece, made for a show this year, I had more time and resources so I decided to move beyond the container of that carriage and focus on the breast. The last piece is Tar Baby. Here I returned to the fetish object, creating pieces that are inviting but at the same time exploring humiliation. What I'm doing here is similar to what some describe as S/M, revisiting the humiliating place but in an arena where I have control, trying to create something beautiful.

When I was an undergraduate, I was asked in an art class to do a self-portrait. I produced a silhouette of my head. Later, at the critique, the instructor told me, "I'm from New York, and I know, you can't get away with this. This is just a typical black head," and he threw it across the table. The point he was trying to make was twofold: first, that using the information of my life and experience, even my own body, was not acceptable, and second, that this was something that women and people of color relied on when their work was not quite up to snuff. In his mind, African American studies, like women's studies, was a ghetto that you went to in order to explore issues about content that had nothing to do with the "formal" concerns of art. Representations of Black women were inflammatory political tricks but at the same time generic and meaningless. Therefore, women and people of color who wanted to be considered serious artists should completely avoid issues of gender, race and sexuality. This instructor asked me to absent myself from my work.

There are many other reasons why I have been told that my work is not effective or valuable. For one, I work with a material considered low. The craft/art debate is certainly a feminist issue. Craft is to female what art is to male. My work in a non-western tradition, focusing on the African pot, is often confusing to people who want to categorize it. I had to go to the Smithsonian and to Winnie Owens Hart at Howard University to learn some of the various processes of doing African ceramics.