This work is rooted in costuming, transformation, and material honesty. I combine visual influences from classical European portraiture and Afro-Caribbean culture with harvested and hand-processed materials that explore the complex sociocultural history of my Caribbean heritage. My portraits are built up using asphalt, a natural emulsion of mineral elements, and bitumen. This has personal significance, as it traces the journey of my grandparents from Trinidad, which holds the world’s largest naturally exposed deposit of asphalt, Pitch Lake, to the oil sands in Northern Alberta, where my grandfather came to work in the 1960s, when the ban on black immigration was lifted.