My solo exhibition, The Offering, opens at Cane Roots Art Gallery on November 19.
That is less than a month away, and for the first time, I am not already finished.
Usually, by this point, every work would be complete or close enough that I could see the entire exhibition clearly. The remaining weeks would be for photographing, documenting, labeling, packing, and worrying about details no one else will ever notice.
This time, I am about 75 percent there.
The final 25 percent is proving to be the hardest.
Since moving to St. Croix, I move more slowly, in the studio and in my life. The island has changed my sense of time. Heat changes the pace. Rain interrupts a plan. Light shifts across the valley. A bird calls from somewhere I cannot see. Materials need to be gathered, cleaned, sorted, dried, and lived with before they reveal what they want to become.
I am learning that moving slowly is not the same as standing still.
The work is happening, even when my hands are quiet. I am noticing. Listening. Walking the land. Collecting fragments. Waiting for an object, an idea, or a memory to tell me where it belongs.
But I would be lying if I said I am completely comfortable with this slower rhythm.
There is still a deadline. The gallery walls are waiting. The calendar keeps moving, even when I do not. Some days, the unfinished work feels full of possibility. Other days, it feels like a question I should already know how to answer.
The first 75 percent carried momentum. Ideas arrived quickly. Materials found one another. Forms began to emerge. This final stretch requires something different. It asks me to make decisions; to cut, attach, remove, complete, and let go.
Finishing means choosing what the work will be instead of continuing to imagine everything it could become.
Perhaps that is why the last 25 percent feels so difficult.
The Offering is rooted in attention: attention to the land, to memory, to what has been discarded, and to what remains. The exhibition brings together objects and gestures shaped by repair, ritual, witnessing, and transformation. It asks what we carry, what we return, and what we might offer back.
I cannot make work about attention while rushing past what the work is asking of me.
So I am trying to trust this pace, even as the opening approaches. I am returning to the studio each day and allowing the work to arrive through repetition: wrapping, weaving, knotting, sorting, stitching, undoing, and beginning again.
Maybe I am not behind.
Maybe I am inside the most demanding part of the process, the place where intention must become form.
On November 19, the doors will open at Cane Roots Art Gallery. The work will leave the privacy of my studio and enter into conversation with other bodies, memories, and ways of seeing.
Until then, I will keep listening.
There is still work to do.
