“Be Unmappable, Be Messy” is a personal ethos that guides my practice and rethinks what it means to be an artist with a complex identity and perspective in a world driven by categories and algorithmic predictions. I am not a category to be captured. I am not a mood board to be replicated. At every turn, I let The Algorithm® fumble with my edges and fail to sort me. Because we are not here to be predicted and boxed in. We are here to be felt and remembered.

My focus is on the question: “Where is the beginning of all the points where our collective lines are blurred?”

What influences me most is a sense that mystery is rapidly disappearing from the world. Scientific and technological advances keep us firmly in control, eroding the magical aspects of life.  We have subdued nature so definitively that any non-rational experience is almost immediately dismissed. However, we still have the absolute freedom to change at any time. To interject with color and nuance. And to inhabit space without always “making sense.”

My work is not just about the objects, images, or words, but about creating a world where the viewer can stop to consider the surreal, mystical qualities of everyday life. Those qualities attributed to some force beyond current scientific understanding or the laws of nature. I use Afro-Indigenous craft to remember that the world can never be fully known and will always have its mysteries.

On the other hand, The Algorithm® feeds on boxes, labels, and aesthetics it can promote and sell to people. But we are not brands. We are not content. We are not product. We are nuance. We are abstraction. Those who ascribe meaning and importance to The Algorithm® have a way of flattening all nuance so that people can become demographics to be studied and captured—made to fit perfectly into product descriptions and sales pipelines to fall down.

I tend to be drawn to the iconography of ancient ideas and materials and their depictions of small details. By being more observant, tactile, and present in my approach to creative expression, I reject the notion of flattening one’s work for easier consumption. I find nothing more exhilarating than allowing perplexity to be caused by my work, and knowing that it is okay to exist outside of expectations.

When producing new works, I typically seek out subjects or objects that will lend themselves to a variety of experimental ideas and stories. Working at a slow pace allows me to capture, construct, and rearrange elements; waiting for the work to suggest a certain memory, vision, or experience. Recently, I have been experimenting with archival methods to anchor pieces into a new permanence with the potential to last for several generations.

My greatest hope is that viewers will be able to look past the physical world and become aware again of their imagination and intuition. To quote anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things; as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.”

—Ocean Lorraine.

Ocean’s recent series, produced over the last 6 months of 2025 in the US, UK, and Japan, explores humanity's prophetic desire to understand how the past informs the present and future. Culminating in a 7-week cross-disciplinary residency at various studios in the Highlands of Scotland, the collection joins Tartan Loom Weaving, Ceramics, Painting, Botanical Printmaking, Photography, Willow Sculpture, Bookbinding, Papermaking, and Polymer Photogravure into a transnational bridge between modern and ancestral visual practice.

Drawing from Afro-Indigenous American Ornithomancy—where bird signs and migration patterns are interpreted as profound spiritual communication integral to making crucial life choices—Ocean merges generational family rituals with philosophy, dramaturgy, and experimental technologies.

Blending fiction and reality, technique and mysticism, her work reimagines relationships between humans, elements, botanicals, and the atmosphere they share. “Another Version of Supernatural Certainty” proposes a world where trees, birds, earth, and sky are as vital as humans in shaping new, interconnected futures.

|| Currently in development || WILDFIRE, a poetic, one-woman stage play written by Ocean Lorraine. This historical drama spotlights the remarkable life of 19th-century Afro-Indigenous American sculptor Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis, tracing her journey from her painful beginnings in North America to her ultimate triumph in Europe.

The play is structured as a sculptural ritual with acts titled "The Naming" and "The Stone That Bleeds," detailing Wildfire's unyielding pursuit of artistic greatness in the face of racial violence, and the trauma she experienced at Oberlin College.

The play uses visceral sound and lighting design—cues like amplified chisel strikes, Ojibwe drum rhythms, and shifting color palettes (ice to gold)—to reflect the character’s emotional landscape.

WILDFIRE is a provocative ritual-based performance that confronts historical erasure and reclaims the narrative of an Afro-indigenous woman sculptor, underscoring the theme that she forged her own legacy in stone.