Constance Collier-Mercado is an experimental writer, artist, and womanist culture worker committed to Black language and collective memory. Born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx, her political home resides in the space between family connections tied to Atlanta, GA; Bolivar County, MS; and Beaufort County/Gastonia, AfroCarolina¹. Consumed by ideas of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, she weaves this aesthetic into her practice via an irreverent blk gender-infinite.
Winner of the 2023 Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing and Finalist for the 2024 Inaugural Southern Prize in Literature, she has received Fellowships from South Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, MacDowell, The Stay at Nearview, The Periplus Collective, The Watering Hole, Kimbilio, The Hambidge Center, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. Her writing has been published in Obsidian, A Gathering Together, Gulf Coast Journal, the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) blog, Hennepin Review, Root Work Journal, The Believer, Kweli Journal, The Auburn Avenue, FIYAH Magazine and via her substack, On Repetition and Revision. Constance lives and works in Southwest Atlanta. She is Founder of The CultSTATUS Arts Haven.
¹see: Michelle Lanier.
I am interested in the subversive potential of nostalgia, marronage, and cyclical movements as found in various afrosurreal and abstract forms of art. Constance SHERESE is the resulting series of "non self-portraits" I use to create similar interventions in my own work. I combine grains of rice and lowcountry flora to create mixed-media collages and elaborate watercolor tracings of family photos, archival objects, roadmaps, and other ephemera. My intent is to retrace our history but also to leave space for the unknown which cannot be mapped or translated. In this way, I both embody and conceal; protect and queer the archive from any outside gaze.
The critical [hoodoo] scholarship underpinning my work emphasizes migration, Black coastal cultures and ecologies, as well as independent study in creative writing, studio arts, film, and ritual performance. Heavy in layering techniques and fusion with other three-dimensional objects (often placed over a photographic base), my finished pieces become a melding of Southern regional color theories, feminine and/or animalistic figures, and rustic objects like tree branches, feathers, charcoal, rice, and grain.
My practice seeks to reconcile the contradictions that come with family roots spread across Mississippi, North & South Carolina, Chicago, the Bronx, and my current work in Atlanta. As a granddaughter of Southern migrants, I see this reconciliation as an extension of diasporic inheritance across Afro-Atlantic cultures. Namely, bridging our recurring cross + roads of difference and connection.
In my poetry, this often manifests as hand-me-down stories of marshland farmers from the gullah geechee culture of my mother’s native Beaufort County, SC. Increasingly, these poems have shifted from remorse at our family’s move North and my loss of an explicit historical connection to reclamation through the food, the land, and a more vernacular/ancestral eco-memory*. When grief does present itself, the saltwater voice of my late grandmother, B, appears in my mouth to dialogue with my also deceased younger sister, C. The private stories they share become seeds for both my fiction and multimedia visual art.
*see: Dr. Melanie L. Harris.
Memory, c. 1996 (3 Generations, 5 American Cities Meet in a Bronx, NY Apartment).
… whose work examines nuance within dialectical, multilingual, and equivocal spaces.