Philece R
Artist Bio
Philece Roberts is a Bahamian artist whose work investigates memory, identity, and emotional duality through portraiture and abstraction. Centering the narratives of Black women, she renders the face as vessel and archive where identity, environment, and memory converge.
Working with graphite, paint, and organic materials such as tea stains, Roberts layers realism with nature and line as structural parallels to psychological states. Her mark-making traces shifts in presence and absence, exploring how identity is preserved and lost across personal, cultural, and ecological memory.
Roberts holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Art Institute of Atlanta. She has illustrated three books and completed commissions for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Strathmore Artist Papers, and Essence Magazine. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally and is held in public and private collections. She lives and works in Nassau, The Bahamas.
Artist Statement
As a portrait and figurative artist, my work is an exploration of identity, memory, and the duality of emotion. I center the experiences of Black women, using nature as both mirror and metaphor to navigate our emotional landscapes.
My practice examines who we are and who we become through cycles of change. What began as a personal response to caring for loved ones experiencing memory loss, has expanded into a broader inquiry into cognition and how memory and environment shape identity and emotional response.
Intuitive and reflective, my process merges realism in graphite and paint with the organic flow of tea stains and symbolic linework, creating a layered map of our experiences. Each piece is an act of holding on and letting go—where beauty and chaos, joy and pain, vulnerability and resilience coexist. Through shared experience, I create work that not only remembers but actively resists forgetting.
