Author: Theda Sandiford

Posted on

Midyear Musings: Art, Travel, and Staying Grounded

As we reach the midpoint of the year, I’ve been reflecting on how structure and intention are keeping me balanced amid the whirlwind of making, exhibiting, and traveling.

With Fiberart International 2025 now open in Pittsburgh—where Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody is on view—and upcoming work headed to Interpretations 2025 in San Diego, the pace is full. Add to that ongoing work at Sky Garden STX, new writing projects, and my research around Provision Grounds, and it would be easy to feel stretched thin. But staying organized has made all the difference.

Lately, my planner has become a trusted studio assistant—helping me map out deadlines, break larger tasks into bite-sized actions, and track how far I’ve come. Whether prepping materials for an installation or scheduling studio time between trips, that clarity has helped me focus on one thing at a time without drowning in the big picture.

Travel also brings fresh energy into the studio. I often return from residencies or exhibitions with new ideas percolating—some that shift my original plans. I’ve learned to build in flexibility so I can respond when a piece wants to grow in an unexpected direction. Organization, for me, isn’t about control—it’s about creating space for creativity to breathe.

June reminded me that structure and discipline aren’t barriers; they’re a foundation. They allow me to honor the work, trust the process, and move forward with intention—even when life gets busy.

Here’s to the next half of the year—grounded, growing, and full of possibility.

Posted on

Instagram Hack—A Quick Note from Me

Friends,

If you received a strange message from my Instagram recently asking you to “vote for me on Spotify”—please know, that wasn’t me.

My account was hacked and out of my control for three days. I deeply apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this caused. And for the record: there’s no such thing as voting on Spotify. I would never send a mass message like that. If I had a real personal ask, I’d send a text or make an old-fashioned phone call—especially if we haven’t spoken in a while.

The experience was frustrating and unsettling, but thankfully I’ve regained access and tightened my security settings.

Please stay vigilant—if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

With gratitude and a side of cyber caution,
Theda

Posted on

No Chain Binds the Soul

No Chain Binds the Soul
Theda Sandiford
66x24x10”
Recovered marine line, sea tumbled, woven and knotted with eyelash yarn, fabric, acrylic yarn , deconstructed line, beads, bells and shells.
2024

This work bears witness to the unseen threads that connect the past, present, and future—an exploration of memory, magic, and spiritual protection, all woven into the fabric of life itself. Using marine debris collected from beaches in the aftermath of hurricanes, alongside conjure bags and objects such as locs of my hair, beads, shells, and my Dad’s old hearing aid batteries, I’ve created a sacred vessel to bridge the realms of the living and the dead.

Beads and shells
Green line
Handmade bells
Beaded center


Posted on

Listening Like a Plant in St. Croix

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World reframes how we see the green world around us—not as passive, cultivated objects, but as active participants in shaping our desires. It’s a perspective that lingers long after the last page, especially here in St. Croix, where the land hums with quiet intelligence.

Pollan’s invitation to view plants as co-creators made me reconsider the medicinal herbs growing wild across my property. Guinea hen weed curling through the underbrush. Lemongrass swaying in the trade winds. Turmeric pushing up in my raised planters. These plants aren’t just there. They arrive, they signal, they speak—if we’re willing to listen.

What if these plants are already in conversation with us, guiding us to notice where balance is needed, where healing is overdue?

Since reading the book, I’ve begun to move more slowly through the land, letting my hands hover before touching, asking inwardly before harvesting. I’m starting to feel that these plants are not just medicine for the body, but memory-keepers, storytellers, and perhaps, old friends with lessons still unfolding.

In St. Croix, where ecological wisdom is hiding in plain sight, The Botany of Desire offers a gentle challenge: to listen more deeply, to be in relationship, not just use.

What might change if we all listened like the plants do—rooted, attentive, and open to what the land is trying to say?

Posted on

Quite Truth From The Margins

Since losing my father this past Thanksgiving, I’ve been leaning more heavily on the quiet practice that has grounded me for decades: journaling. I’ve kept journals and scrapbooks since childhood, but it was reading The Artist’s Way in the ’90s that made writing a consistent part of my creative and emotional life.

These pages are where I process—ideas, emotions, memories, the mundane, the magical. After I finish a piece of art, I often return to what I was writing during its making. In those margins, glimmers emerge. Little phrases. Sensory echoes. Emotions I couldn’t name at the time. And from there, poems begin to form.

Until now, I’ve kept most of these poems to myself. They’ve always felt deeply personal—like offerings only meant for the page. But recently, I was encouraged to begin sharing them, not just as a part of my grieving process, but as an extension of my artistic one.

So here goes.

I’ll be sharing select poems in the weeks ahead—tender words that trace the undercurrents of loss, memory, and healing. They live between fiber and feeling, just like my art.

Posted on

Join Me at MAFA 2025: Weave, Unburden, and Heal

This month, I’m bringing the Emotional Baggage Cart Parade to the MidAtlantic Fiber Association (MAFA) Conference, and I’d love for you to be part of this transformative, hands-on public art experience.

📍 Millersville University, Millersville, PA
📅 June 26–29, 2025
🔗 More Info →

We all carry emotional baggage—grief, stress, trauma, worry. While it shows up differently for each of us, the weight is real. How we carry it—or release it—shapes our path forward.

The Emotional Baggage Cart Parade is a living, evolving public sculpture and a communal ritual. At MAFA, I’ll be leading a participatory art session where you’re invited to weave your story directly onto a full-size shopping cart using provided materials—or you can bring meaningful objects of your own to integrate into the piece.

Through open dialogue, I’ll share the inspiration behind the project and invite you to reflect on what you’re carrying, what you’re ready to release, and how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for healing.

Public Art Project: Emotional Baggage Cart – Unburden, Weave, Connect, Heal

🧶 Weave your truth
🧳 Unpack your story
🤝 Connect with others
💫 Heal through art

This isn’t just about making art—it’s about making space. Space for empathy. Space for release. Space for transformation.

Come contribute to a collective sculpture that symbolizes our shared journey of resilience. Together, we’ll turn invisible weight into visible solidarity.

See you in Millersville. Let’s unburden, weave, and heal—together.
—Theda

Posted on

Where Air Meets Musk

Entre Genres captures the essence of a cloud in a bottle, where airy meets musk in an interplay of weightlessness and sensuality.

Entre Genres—between genders—echoes in the in-between: between what’s seen and what’s felt, between softness and sharpness, between what we carry and what we choose to let go.

When I wrap and weave with reclaimed materials—veggie mesh bags, marine line, sari yarn, beads, cowrie shells, bottle caps—I’m telling stories that don’t fit neatly into boxes. These are stories about how gender, race, memory, and power collide. They’re messy, layered, sometimes contradictory—just like the objects I gather.

I don’t believe in fixed categories. My practice is fluid. A soft sculpture can be a shield. A braid can draw a boundary. A shopping cart can carry both trauma and transformation. The materials I use slip between definitions—just like I do.

In my hands, materials shift. They become tools of protection, celebration, resistance. I’m not interested in clean edges—I’m drawn to what happens when we blur them, stretch them, braid something new from the fray.

That’s where the beauty lives—in the becoming.

When I first smelled the fragrance—a cloud of musks—I thought of sunrise. That first light brushing across the sky, the hush of morning dew, the coo of doves at dawn. I wanted to turn that feeling into form—something you don’t just see, but sense, like the memory of a sun-kissed face.

Every material was chosen for how it plays with light—how it glows, reflects, and diffuses, just like scent disperses in the air. The musks—warm, intimate, almost skin-like—inspired my palette and textures.

Rather than represent the scent literally, I focused on the sensation—how musk lingers close to the body, how it lives in that space between presence and absence. This piece doesn’t just exist in space; it inhabits it, like a fragrance does. It’s about drift, about trace, about what lingers.

Much of my work lives in this realm—between touch and memory, between what’s held and what’s released. A cloud of musks became an invitation to make something that doesn’t shout, but whispers. Something that floats in the air between us.

Coty Infiniment Paris Installation
Coty Infiniment Paris Booth at 1-54 Art Fair
Wall Label
Posted on

Still Time to Catch FIBER 2025 at Silvermine Galleries

Blackity Black Blanket, ladders and emotional baggage cart, ladders only

If you haven’t made it to FIBER 2025 yet, there’s still time. The exhibition runs through June 19, 2025 at Silvermine Galleries in New Canaan, CT, and it’s a must-see for anyone interested in the power and politics of fiber art today.

My work in the show, Blackity Black Blanket Ladder, offers a visceral reflection on the cumulative weight of microaggressions. Zip tie blankets draped over a ladder suggest an attempted ascent—each rung a moment of resilience—but the comfort one might expect is absent. Instead, the piece confronts the viewer with the tension of trying to rise while carrying the heaviness of daily indignities.

FIBER 2025 features an incredible lineup of artists redefining what fiber can do and say. Don’t miss your chance to experience it.

📍 Silvermine Galleries
📅 On view through June 19, 2025
🧶 More info here

—Theda

Posted on

Summer 2025: Weaving New Futures

This summer, my work travels across states and seas, gathering threads of memory, identity, and community in a series of exhibitions that speak to love, resilience, and the emotional labor we carry.

The Future Belongs to the Loving
Now through – July 31, 2025
MAPSpace | 6 N Pearl St, 4th Floor, Port Chester, NY
mapspace.art

Love, in this exhibition, is not a soft whisper but a radical act. The Future Belongs to the Loving gathers voices from artists committed to compassion as resistance. Tender Crown is a sculptural meditation on the intimate rituals of Black hair care—where tenderness and tension coexist. The work evokes the memory of tight braids and firm hands, each parting and twist pulling not just at the scalp, but at identity itself. Beauty here is not effortless; it’s labor, discipline, love, and pain intertwined. This crown remembers the sting, the throb, the scalp still tingling with memory.

FIBER 2025
May 10 – June 19, 2025
Silvermine Galleries | 1037 Silvermine Rd, New Canaan, CT
Opening Reception: May 17

Fiber is language—resilient, tactile, expressive. At FIBER 2025, I join fellow artists in celebrating the breadth of contemporary fiber practices. My work here, Blackity Black Blanket ladder provides a visceral portrayal of navigating the relentless barrage of microaggressions, highlighting the absence of comfort. The ladders adorned with zip tie blankets symbolize my endeavor to ascend beyond microaggressions, yet the weight of these interactions impedes upward progress.

Theda Sandiford Studio Tour / Ecopark Walk
June 19, 2025 | 11am – 2:00pm
Sky Garden Gallery Retreat | Kingshill, St. Croix, USVI

For those on island or visiting, I invite you into my studio at Sky Garden—an oasis where art, ecology, and ancestral memory intersect. Walk the grounds, see where I gather and process materials, and join me in conversation about land-based creativity and healing. RSVP recommended for this intimate, immersive experience.

Fiberart International 2025
June 20 – August 30, 2025
Brew House Arts | 711 S 21st St #210, Pittsburgh, PA
Opening Night: June 20 | 4:30 – 8:00pm
Artist Gallery Tour: June 21 | 11am – 12pm

An international survey of fiber’s future, this juried exhibition is a touchstone for textile artists worldwide. I’m honored to exhibit among a visionary group that is pushing the medium’s boundaries. My work here, Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody reflects on the environment and sustainability and is inspired by the lush vegetation found on my rainforest property in St Croix USVI. I wove single-use bottle caps into vines and flowers to replicating the vibrant colors and intricate patterns of vines, orchids, Heliconias, and Birds of Paradise that surround me.

MidAtlantic Fiber Association Conference – Emotional Baggage Cart Parade
June 26 – 29, 2025
Millersville University | Millersville, PA
View Exhibit Info →

We all carry invisible weight. The Emotional Baggage Cart Parade transforms that weight into visual metaphors through shopping carts wrapped in stories. This interactive exhibit invites reflection, empathy, and communal healing. Come see how individual struggles become collective strength—one cart at a time. MAFA has day passes available, come through so we can connect. Register here.

Wherever you are this summer—Port Chester, New Canaan, Pittsburgh, Millersville, or St. Croix—I hope our paths cross. Please let me know if we can meet up this month.

—Theda