The Work Beneath the Work

There is a kind of work that happens before the work.

It doesn’t photograph well.
It doesn’t post.
It doesn’t announce itself as progress.

It looks like walking.
Reading.
Sitting with something that hasn’t found its form yet.

It looks like silence.

I’ve learned not to rush that space anymore.
The in-between is not empty.
It’s where things are rearranging—quietly, stubbornly, beneath the surface.

For a long time, I thought sustaining a creative life meant producing constantly.
Keeping pace.
Keeping up.

But that’s not what holds.

What holds is the ability to return.
To come back to the work without ceremony.
Without perfection.
Without waiting to feel ready.

To return when it’s unclear.
When it’s slow.
When it feels like nothing is happening.

Because something is always happening.

These days, I ask myself simpler questions:
What is my practice asking of me right now?
What is the smallest way I can show up today?

And I listen.

Making room has become part of the work.
Not a pause from it,
but the place where it begins.

The Color Purple

If you know me, you know how much I love the color purple.

Not just for its beauty, but for what it holds. Purple has always felt like something I move with, somewhere between earth and spirit, between the everyday and something more ancient. And yes… maybe a little bit of Prince lives in that feeling too, the way he made purple into a world you could step into.

Tyrian Purple carries that same weight in a very real way. A color once extracted with time, labor, and devotion. A color that signaled power, but also process, something earned, something made slowly.

Watching this video, I kept thinking about material and meaning. How something so small can carry so much history. How color itself can be a record, of place, of bodies, of hands at work.

Press play. Let it unfold.

Stitching Care Into the World: Knit for Food 2026

On April 11, 2026, knitters around the world will gather for the Knit for Food Knit-a-thon 2026, a 12-hour knitting marathon raising funds to fight food insecurity.

Participants can knit for the full twelve hours, join for a few rows, or simply donate. Funds raised will be shared equally among Feeding America, World Central Kitchen, No Kid Hungry, and Meals on Wheels.

Fiber has always been a language of care. Stitch by stitch, makers gather across distances, using their hands to support something larger than themselves.

If you knit, consider joining the marathon—or support the effort here:
https://givebutter.com/knitforfood26

Sometimes the smallest stitches help hold the world together.

Breathing Room

April is quiet.

One show, Expressive Creative Soul 2026 at Bridge Art Gallery and the rest is space.

No rush. No stacking deadlines. Just time back in the studio.

Focus feels different here. Slower. Sharper.
I can sit with an idea long enough to see if it holds.
Follow a thread without forcing where it ends.

There’s work forming, nothing loud yet.
Just materials shifting, small decisions adding up.

This isn’t a pause.
It’s pressure in the right place.

Less noise.
More making.

Studio Conversations: Watch the Replay

I recently joined Bridge Arts Gallery for an Expressive Creative Soul artist talk.

It was a chance to share a little about the work behind the work—my materials, the stories woven into them, and how fiber becomes a language for memory, protection, and repair.

If you missed the live conversation, the replay is now available.

Pour a cup of tea, settle in, and spend a little time in the studio with me.

Repair as Ritual: A 15-Minute Invitation

There’s always a piece in my studio that has gone quiet
the seam that split,
the weave pulled too tight,
the form I stopped trusting.

Instead of discarding it, I’ve been listening.

I’m inviting you to join me.

Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Bring a stalled project or even just a scrap of cloth.

Gather what you have:
fabric scraps, thread or yarn, a needle, scissors, clips or pins, and any found materials nearby, netting, ribbon, cordage, plant fibers. Nothing fancy required.

For five minutes, just explore. Twist. Wrap. Knot.
For five minutes, respond to one place of tension. Mend visibly.
For five minutes, let the materials suggest what comes next.

Don’t aim for perfect. Aim for relationship.

When the timer ends, stop. Step back. Notice what shifted.

If you participate, share a photo and a few words in the comments.
Where was it tight? What changed?

Let’s gather here.
Let’s hold what almost fell apart.
Let’s begin again, together.

Emotional Baggage

We all carry something.

Some of us hide it well.
Some of us drag it loudly behind us.
Some of us pretend our hands are empty.

I carry a lifetime of racial trauma.

Not always visible.
But weighted.
Inherited.
Accumulated in small daily increments.

The cart came to me as truth.

A shopping cart, the most ordinary American vehicle , has become the right container for what I have been pushing for decades. Plastic newspaper sleeves. Bad headlines. Disposable language. Woven into structure.

I refuse to let bad news be the only narrative.

So I spray the cart gold.
I add a black racing stripe, velocity, lineage, survival.
I attach a bell.

Joyful resistance is not softness.
It is decision.

It is choosing to move forward without letting the weight define the direction.
It is turning debris into design.
It is building beauty out of what tried to diminish you.

This is not about erasing trauma.

It is about carrying it differently.

And ringing the bell anyway.

Head Work

I have long admired Jean-Michel Basquiat.

When I recently read about his obsession with drawing human heads, how the skull became portal, how repetition became inquiry, I felt a quiet recognition. He wasn’t drawing likeness. He was excavating identity.

That resonates.

For much of my artistic life, I have returned to abstract self-portraiture as a way to understand my own mixed-race identity. Before the weaving, before the marine debris and sacred vessels, there were faces. Fragmented. Multiplied. Obscured.

The head was my terrain.

Inside it, I was always calculating.
Adjusting.
Disappearing and reappearing.

Mixed race.
Black woman.
Read before I could speak.

So I studied myself first.
Where to soften.
Where to sharpen.
Where to hide in plain sight.

Abstraction allowed me to map what it meant to code switch, those subtle recalibrations of voice, posture, softness, power. The masks were not theatrical; they were protective. Sometimes armor. Sometimes camouflage. Sometimes simply a way to hide in plain sight.

In those early works, faces fractured, eyes doubled, mouths silenced or amplified, I wasn’t trying to be obscure. I was trying to be honest. I was drawing the invisible labor of navigating racialized space.

The head became:

  • A map of tension
  • A container for ancestry
  • A site of translation
  • A sanctuary

Today my practice lives in fiber; knotting, wrapping, weaving memory into form. But when I look back at those early abstract self-portraits, I see the same impulse.

The masks became knots.
The layers became cordage.
The head became vessel.

Admiring Basquiat reminds me that returning to the same image again and again is not fixation, it is devotion. Returning to the head, again and again, is a way of saying: this is where my story lives.

And in that conversation, I continue to draw myself, fractured, layered, crowned, protected, learning that abstraction has always been my way home.

Fiber 2026: Power Puff and Black Racing Stripe

I’m happy to share that Power Puff and Black Racing Stripe has been selected for Fiber 2026, opening this Saturday at AlterWork Studios.

Fiber has always been a material of contradiction, soft yet resilient, domestic yet radical. This exhibition brings together artists working across traditional textile practices and contemporary fiber experimentation, showing just how expansive the medium has become.

For me, fiber is a language.
It holds tension.
It carries memory.

Power Puff and Black Racing Stripe sits within that conversation, playful on the surface, but rooted in deeper questions about identity, material culture, and the quiet power of making with our hands.

If you’re in New York, I hope you’ll stop by.

Opening Reception
Saturday, March 7, 2026
6–9 PM

On View
March 7 – March 28, 2026
Daily, 12–9 PM

📍 AlterWork Studios
40-20 22nd Street
Long Island City, NY

Learn more:
https://www.alterworkstudios.com/fiber

It’s always an honor to be in conversation with other artists working in fiber, stretching the medium, knot by knot, into new terrain.