#Oxum or #Oshun is one of the most beloved #Orixás. She's the goddess of rivers and waterfalls and represents purity, fertility, love, and sensuality. She's also linked to money and female force. Oxum is represented by a beautiful woman adorned from head to toe with gold jewellery, sitting on the edge of a river(mine decided to take a dip!). Her salutation is Ora Yê Yê Ô!

These Illustrations are part of some digital painting courses I've been doing during lockdown and some are my final projects and other just development projects, like this one. 

I've decided to dive into my country's beautiful African cultural heritage and how it evolved into something unique and powerful. In that process I am trying to understand my roots, my relationship with race and why are Afro-Brazilian religions the most marginalised in Brazil. My grandmother was from Bahia and although she identified as a white woman and wasn't part of any Candomblé practice (that I'm aware of 🤔), it's a way to bring me closer to her.

Being brought up as a white middle class girl in Rio, It came as a shocker when, at a hospital in London, I had to fill in a form and state my ethnicity. I marked the white box, obvs. The lady looked at me and asked politely if I wanted to revise it. Maybe mark the mixed race one. I had no idea what to do. She saw the confusion in my face and suggested maybe I would be more comfortable marking the "other white background" box then? I felt like an idiot.

That was around 7 years ago and I've been questioning myself and my bias towards race since then. I don't have black parents or grandparents, but I have dark skin, dark hair, my mother and aunts have curly hair and it seems I don't look very white by local standards. I also had a few unconnected black friends asking me about my heritage and wondering where's the black ancestor in my family tree. Getting out of my comfortable circumstance and moving to London made me rethink my idea of race and racism completely. 

So bear with me, these projects are both a technical learning curve and a form of therapy, trying to make peace with my ignorant self and exploring a beautiful new world of possibilities...