Fiber artists are claiming space, building, binding, and constructing works that move beyond the wall and into lived, dimensional experience. Fiber & Form: Tactile Acts of Threading Space, presented by the Surface Design Association, brings together artists, curators, and thinkers who are using fiber to address memory, justice, scale, and belonging.
The symposium launches Saturday, February 7, with keynote talks and panels, followed by intimate meetups and small-group sessions through February 12. Held on Zoom, all sessions will be recorded and available to attendees through April 2026.
I’ll be facilitating a community meetup: Meetup | Fiber Therapy: Untangling Creative Problems Wednesday, February 11 | 7 PM EST
This is a collective troubleshooting session. Bring your most difficult projects, perplexing problems, and frustrating obstacles—we’ll work through them together. Come to one or both meetups and tap into the shared intelligence of the fiber community.
I’m honored to share that my work is currently on view in Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths, a powerful group exhibition curated by nico w. okoro in collaboration with Connecticut College’s Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), commemorating CCSRE’s 20th anniversary.
The exhibition is on view January 20 – March 6, 2025 at the Cummings Arts Center, inside the Joanne Toor Cummings Gallery. The galleries are free and open to the public.
Exhibition Reception
Monday, January 26, 2025 4:30 – 6:30 PM EST Cummings Arts Center, Joanne Toor Cummings Gallery Free and open to the public
I will be in attendance and would love to see you there.
My Works in the Exhibition
Liminal Staff
Liminal Staff
Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled, woven and knotted with alpaca wool, fabric, acrylic yarn, beads, shells, washers, vintage watch parts, and deconstructed line.
Liminal Staff is an emblem of authority and sovereignty,, a sacred artifact that operates as a conduit between worlds. Crafted from recovered marine line shaped by hurricanes and tides, the work is layered with memory and intention. Each knot and material fragment carries a story reclaimed from chaos and transformed into a vessel of spiritual protection and ancestral reverence.
This piece emerges from the tension of being both tethered and adrift. It honors the countless lives lost to the Atlantic, the water graves of the enslave, and the resilience of those who survived. Bridging the living and the dead, land and sea, Liminal Staff echoes tidal pull and cyclical time. Conjure bags, locs of hair, and marine debris lend their essence, layering the work with magic, memory, and reclamation.
We are water’s kin. Like rivers flowing unerringly toward the sea, this piece speaks to our origins, our endurance, and the enduring human capacity to find our way home.
Offering to the Lost Ones
Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled, woven and knotted with eyelash yarn, acrylic yarn, deconstructed line, glass beads, shells, chain, and handmade bells.
Offering to the Lost Ones is a beacon of remembrance honoring the spirits lost during the transatlantic slave trade, while also reflecting on humanity’s ongoing disruption of the natural world. Shaped by storms, the materials carry dual histories, environmental devastation and the turbulent seas that bore witness to unimaginable human suffering.
Each knot, bead, and bell holds space for reflection, transforming debris into a solemn offering for those whose names dissolved into the depths of the Atlantic. Chains and bells converse with shells and glass, mirroring the tension between bondage and liberation, death and resilience.
This work calls us to remember the past while confronting the present. The sea holds ancestral grief and the scars of modern neglect. In this offering, mourning becomes a gesture toward healing, between people, memory, and the natural world.
About the Exhibition
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths dismantles social constructs of race, space, and place, imagining an end to the living legacies of colonialism that continue to bind them. The exhibition features work by:
Ophelia Arc, Nic[o] Brierre-Aziz, Alexis Callender, Adger Cowans, Lewis Derogene, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shabez Jamal, Fidelis Joseph, Nsenga Knight, Ron Norsworthy, Theda Sandiford, Toby Sisson, Dina Nur Satti, and Amanda Russhell Wallace.
If you’re nearby, I hope you’ll join us for the opening reception on January 26. These works are offerings of memory, of reckoning, and of repair and it means a great deal to share that space with you.
Installation view fromMeltdown: A Changing Climate ArtsWestchester
Inspired by the lush vegetation surrounding my rainforest property, Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody is built from close observation of what grows around me each day. I wove single-use plastic bottle caps into vines and floral forms, using color, repetition, and pattern to mirror the plants that hold my attention—orchids, heliconias, birds of paradise, and the dense, winding vines that thread through the landscape.
Working with discarded materials allowed me to translate the vibrancy of this environment while acknowledging the presence of plastic within it. The bottle caps become leaves, petals, and stems—familiar shapes rendered in synthetic form. The piece is less a replica of the rainforest than a response to it, shaped by daily proximity, care, and attention.
Installed within Meltdown, the work sat quietly in conversation with the exhibition’s broader themes, offering a moment rooted in observation and material transformation. The installation images document a process of looking closely, collecting slowly, and weaving what is already here into something new.
Meltdown: A Changing Climate has now closed at ArtsWestchester. Installation photos: Maksim Akelin
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.
Every Friday, I clean my studio. It is not a chore, it is a ritual, a meditation that drives my practice forward. As I put things away, I am not just tidying; I am revisiting. Each clear plastic bin is a library of experiences, a living archive of histories waiting to be rediscovered, retold, and remixed.
Sometimes, a material I had tucked aside calls out insistently, use me now. Other times, I stumble upon a project I had abandoned in frustration, only to find that the solution has quietly revealed itself with time. What was once stuck begins to flow again.
The act of cycling through materials becomes a dialogue. Textures whisper stories, colors tug at memories, and forgotten scraps offer new directions. In these moments, the materiality of my practice shows itself as storytelling, guiding my hands and spirit.
Cleaning becomes organizing my ideas, making space for clarity. It often spills into journaling, as I empty out mental lists and thoughts into my sketchbook, making room for new ones to arrive. Because I am always working on multiple projects at once, this weekly ritual is an editing process, helping me to focus, reset, and refine.
And when the work is done, when every bin is re-stacked and every surface clear, my studio stands ready, an open field for the next round of experiments. Friday cleaning is both an ending and a beginning, a pause that breathes new life into my practice.
Along roadsides and shorelines, yellow wild cotton flowers rise from the brush, soft, resilient, unassuming. Survivors from the island’s plantation past, they grow without asking to be seen. Hiding in plain sight, the cotton carries a memory that never left the land. Its presence is so familiar it is often overlooked. Most people drive by. I stop.
This cotton holds ancestral knowledge. It remembers hands before mine, hands that picked, cleaned, spun, and carried this fiber through lives shaped by pain, endurance, and ingenuity. The plant persists not as monument, but as quiet inheritance. The land keeps the lesson.
When I collect the fibers, I do so with care and intention, aware that this plant once shaped lives, landscapes, and economies. What remains now is not the plantation, but the cotton itself, still growing, still offering. I gather slowly, listening. Later, in the studio, I clean and spin the fibers into string, coaxing continuity from what was nearly forgotten. The motion is circular, meditative. Lint by linters, the past moves forward through my hands.
Each strand becomes a quiet conversation between land and hand, past and present. The cotton is no longer a remnant; it becomes material for repair, for remembering, for transformation.
This is not nostalgia. It is transmission, a way of honoring what was carried, what survived, and what still teaches. The cotton does not belong to history alone. It belongs to now: to breath, to making, to memory still in motion.
January is a moment of transition; an opportunity to catch work as it closes and to step into what’s just beginning. This month, two exhibitions featuring my work come to a close, while a new exhibition opens shortly after. If you’re able to visit, I hope you’ll take advantage of these moments.
Closing This Month
Meltdown: A Changing Climate ArtsWestchester Galleries | White Plains, NY October 12, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Meltdown: A Changing Climate brings together artists responding to the accelerating impacts of climate change and environmental instability. Through material, process, and form, the exhibition examines ecological vulnerability, resilience, and human responsibility in an era of environmental crisis. Learn more ›
Interpretations 2025 Visions Museum of Textile Art | San Diego, CA October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
Interpretations 2025 showcases innovative contemporary textile works that push the boundaries of fiber, materiality, and narrative. The exhibition coincides with Interpretations 2025 Festival Days, which included artist talks, awards, and community gatherings celebrating excellence in contemporary textile art.
Opening This Month
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths Cummings Art Galleries, Connecticut College | New London, CT January 20 – March 6, 2026 Opening Reception: January 26, 2026 Curated by nico w. okoro
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths dismantles social constructs of race, space, and place, examining the enduring legacies of colonialism that shape lived experience. Through material and conceptual practices, the exhibition imagines borders not as fixed lines, but as contested and transformative spaces.
I’ll be in town for the opening reception and would love to connect—please reach out if you’re planning to attend.
This week marks one year since my father’s passing, November 22. In that time, there have been so many milestones without him: his birthday, my birthday, holidays that felt quieter, thinner somehow. Each one has been a reminder of his absence, but also of the love and ritual that remain.
I’ve been working through the loss with my Mummy Bear series; a practice that began long before he died, when his memory started to fade. Every year since, I’ve created a new bear as an act of remembrance, a way to preserve our bond through my hands. What began as grief work has evolved into something larger, a visual language for love, memory, and transformation.
Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It loops and unravels, it knots itself into the fabric of daily life. As I approach this anniversary, I find myself both heavy and grateful, for the years we had, for the ritual of making, for the quiet ways art holds what words cannot.
Each Mummy Bear is a conversation between what was and what remains. In the knotting, the wrapping, the layering, I find him, and, in some small way, find myself again.
I am having one of those bittersweet, full-circle moments, the kind where disappointment and delight show up holding hands.
While going deep down the rabbit hole researching altered tins and assemblage artists, I landed on not one, but two videos about Sari Dienes. And suddenly I was hit with a realization:
How did I forget her?
I know I’ve seen Sari’s work before, likely in some New York museum or gallery when I was a teenager roaming the city hungry for art, I didn’t yet have language for. I remember being struck by her permission to use anything, flattened tin cans, driftwood, street rubbings, debris, as treasured material. Her rhythm felt familiar. Like a cousin I didn’t know I had.
And yet… I never truly clocked her. She was buried somewhere in the unlabeled vault of “things I’ve seen that shaped me before I knew they had.”
So yes, I am disappointed in myself for not being conscious of that connection earlier. For not honoring an influence sooner. For all the times I’ve spoken about assemblage without saying her name.
But oh, how grateful I am to meet her again now, not as a teenager looking up at art, but as an artist looking sideways across time, recognizing a fellow traveler.
This is why I thankful to the University of YouTube. My YouTube MFA studies are ongoing and fully immersive. Tuition is free but the tuition cost is humility, the willingness to admit that everything I think I know must be periodically burned down to make room for what I do not yet know.
I am learning to surrender certainty. To let curiosity guide me instead of credentials.
So here I am, deep in the tin shrine, reliquary, assemblage wormhole, and Sari Dienes has entered the chat like a long-lost friend tapping me on the shoulder saying:
