As I look toward 2026, I am entering a new, yet deeply familiar chapter in my studio practice. I am calling it Ritual Completion. This body of work began not with a new idea, but with a long-delayed act: finally unpacking and sorting through the last of the studio boxes shipped from New Jersey to St. Croix more than two years ago.
What I thought would be a practical task, unpacking, sorting, repacking, quickly became something else. As I handled old mixed-media works, studies, and experiments, I began pulling a few pieces aside. Not to archive them away again, but to return to them. The work asked to be revisited.
For years, my studio has quietly held the evidence of curiosity: half-finished works, abandoned studies, experiments paused mid-breath. Works on paper folded into drawers. Mono prints stacked and forgotten. Collage papers and Xerox cutouts saved from earlier projects. Materials gathered with intention and optimism, then set aside when time, energy, or clarity moved elsewhere.
Ideas have never been in short supply. They arrive through late-night YouTube deep dives, doom scrolling on Instagram, gallery visits, art fairs, and long conversations with other artists. There is always a new technique to try, a new material to incorporate. These side quests don’t always yield results and sometimes they do, beyond my wildest imagination. Many became projects that taught me something essential, even if they never arrived where I initially thought they were headed.
Rather than seeing these works as incomplete, I am now seeing them as waiting.
This new practice is about returning, slowly and deliberately to those moments. I am revisiting old mixed-media experiments with a new eye, informed by years of making, living, grieving, healing, and unlearning. Some pieces will finally be finished. Others will be pushed further than I ever intended, just to see what breaks open, what resists, what transforms. Some will utterly fail and that, too, is part of the work.
Alongside these revisited pieces are the materials I have been collecting for decades:
Altoid tins. Cigar boxes. Candle lids. Tin cans. Milk pull tabs. Bread tags. Can tabs. Broken toys and fragments of jewelry. Bottle caps. Wrapping paper, old cards, tissue paper, grocery mesh. Objects rescued from daily life and held in quiet conversation with future possibility.
These materials have always felt like witnesses, small, humble moments of time and touch. In this season, I am honoring them by finally inviting them into form: vessels for remembering, devotion, release, and becoming.
This practice is not about productivity or clearing space for the sake of order. It is about intention. About listening again. About allowing unfinished ideas to complete themselves or to teach me why they couldn’t before. It is a ritual of closure, continuation, and permission.
There is something deeply healing in acknowledging that not everything needs to be new to be meaningful. Sometimes the most honest work comes from returning to what we once left behind, carrying it forward with tenderness instead of judgment.
As 2026 unfolds, I will be sharing moments from this process—what gets completed, what gets transformed, and what surprises me along the way.
Stay tuned.