My work lives at the intersection of creative activism and care. It is rooted in a belief that art can be a tool for social justice, one that invites people to touch, to gather, to remember, and to reckon. Through interactive installations and public-facing projects, I explore decolonization not as an abstract theory, but as a lived, material practice. I work through tactility, storytelling, and memory mining, allowing the body, hands, hair, fiber, soil, sand to hold knowledge that words alone cannot.
Recycling and repurposing are central to my practice. Nearly everything I use has already lived a life: clothing worn by friends and family, discarded marine debris, overlooked materials deemed broken or expendable. These materials are transformed into rope, vessels, and sculptural forms that merge the personal with the collective. In this process, I engage in shadow work, addressing what has been marginalized, silenced, or rendered invisible by colonial systems. Natural hairstyles like braids and locs, long questioned in white spaces for their “respectability” or professionalism, become both material and metaphor, sites of resistance, pride, and embodied history.
My work is also deeply eco-social. It exists at the intersection of gardening and art, land and labor, place and belonging. Whether through placemaking, public engagement, or community-centered rituals, I am interested in how we tend to what we inherit, culturally, environmentally, and spiritually. Like a garden, this work requires attention, patience, and care. It asks what can be composted, what can be repaired,
Behold the Lamb of God, still walking among us, in every act of grace, in every choice to love, in every soul brave enough to forgive.
Recovered marine line, sea tumbled, woven and knotted with yarn , deconstructed line, ice dyed sari fabric, hair adornments, shell, wooden cross, spray paint and zip ties
This piece begins with what the sea gives back. Recovered fishing net, sun-bleached, knotted, and scarred by use, becomes the armature for braided strands threaded with salvaged bottle caps. Each braid is a quiet act of repair, gathering what was discarded, listening to its history, and coaxing it into new form.
Together, net and cap hold tension: soft against hard, fluid against fixed, ocean memory against human habit. Still in motion, the work asks to be handled slowly. Knots are negotiated, braids lengthened, stories layered. What is emerging is a record of tides, touch, and the ongoing work of reimagining what we leave behind.
On view through early March, Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths invites viewers into a critical and poetic reckoning with the social constructs of race, space, and place, and the enduring legacies of colonialism that bind them together.
Curated by Nico W. Okoro, the exhibition gathers works that sit in tension: soft gestures carrying hard truths, quiet materiality holding urgent questions. The artists resist fixed boundaries, instead imagining borderlands as sites of possibility—where histories are unsettled, identities are fluid, and inherited systems can be dismantled and reimagined.
Important update: due to the recent snowstorm, the opening reception originally scheduled for February has been rescheduled to March 2, 2026. The exhibition remains open to the public during its full run, and we look forward to gathering in person once conditions allow.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition Dates: January 20 – March 6, 2026
Opening Reception:March 2, 2026(rescheduled due to weather)
Location:Cummings Art Galleries Connecticut College 270 Mohegan Avenue Parkway New London, CT 06320
At a moment when borders, geographic, cultural, and ideological are increasingly weaponized, Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths offers space to pause, feel, and think differently. It asks what becomes possible when margins soften, when we listen across difference, and when art becomes a site for both reckoning and repair.
If you’re in the region, make time to experience the exhibition, and join us on March 2 to mark its opening together.
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.
