Under the luminous pull of the Strawberry Moon, I began crafting the Rootstick Tide Wands, objects shaped by intuition, ritual, and memory. Each wand started with driftwood and sea-worn scraps gathered from the land and shore: bones, feathers, quartz, crystals, discarded necklaces. I wrapped and adorned them with yarn, selenite, cowrie shells, buttons, and beads—allowing each element to speak its own truth.
This is more than assemblage; it is a quiet invocation. A binding of spirit and story. Rooted in diasporic folklore, these wands are made to ward off duppies, clear stagnant energy, and tether intention.
They are not decorative. They are ritual instruments, both ward and witness, born from loss, longing, and the fierce grace of viriditas, St. Hildegard’s divine greening force.
This summer has been a gentle stillness—a season of rest, reflection, and quiet becoming.
I’m honored to have work currently on view in Fiberart International 2025, a juried biennial exhibition showcasing contemporary textile art from around the globe. If you’re in Pittsburgh, you can catch the show at Brew House Arts (711 S 21st St #210) through August 30, 2025. The depth and diversity of work in this show is incredible, it’s worth the visit.
Looking ahead, I’ll be showing work in Interpretations 2025 at the Visions Museum of Textile Art in San Diego. The exhibition opens October 17 and runs through January 10, 2026. I’ll be in town for the Festival Days, on the 17th and 18th. If you’re in Southern California, I’d love to connect while I’m there.
In the meantime, I’m taking the next three months to dive deeply into the development of Liminal Rites, a new immersive installation exploring the thresholds between this world and the spirit world. This body of work has been slowly gestating since the beginning of the year, guided by dreams, rituals, and research.
I’ve been gathering foraged materials, weaving textures of memory and transformation, and building what will become a ritual altar table layered with intention. Video, soundscapes, and scent will round out the sensory experience, designed not just to be seen, but felt.
This is sacred, slow work. A season of inward focus. I’m allowing the process to unfold in its own rhythm, trusting the liminal space between inspiration and manifestation.
Not a retreat, exactly, but a recalibration. I’ve been recharging through rest and meditation, giving my mind, body and spirit space to breathe. In the swirl of projects, it’s easy to slip into autopilot. But this month, I chose to move with intention.
Each morning begins with stillness. I open the Hallow App and let the rhythm of guided prayer set the tone. Then, I walk to the studio and press play on my new morning playlist, an alchemical blend of sound designed to unlock flow. You can listen along here: Sky Garden STX Morning.
Between weaving, knotting, writing, and Zooms, I wander the garden paths, letting the plants teach me how growth happens, slowly, silently, often beneath the surface. Stillness is part of the process. Stillness, I’m learning is not absence. It’s part of becoming.
I’ve also been deep in the writings and music of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century mystic, composer, and healer. She saw divinity threaded through every leaf and sound, and believed that body, mind, and soul must be nurtured in harmony. Her word viriditas, the greening force of vitality, has been echoing in my studio practice. It reminds me that rest isn’t a break from creativity; it’s fertile ground for it. Rest is a sacred act of preparation.
This season of slowing down is giving rise to new ideas, new rituals, new ways of listening, to my materials, to my ancestors, to the whisper of the quiet voice within.
“Talismanic Reverence” explores intention as tangible power, blending rituals and symbolism. Crafted from wood, leather, yarn and found materials, holds energy for empowerment. Bathed in moonlight and infused with incense, these objects ground spiritual intention, inviting prosperity and blessings.
Close up kitchen twineMarine line and moreClose up ink cartridge
“We are not invisible because the world does not see us. We become invisible when we cannot see ourselves.” —Ben Okri, The Famished Road
This line sticks with me. It speaks to the quiet power of ritual, of reflection, of seeing ourselves clearly—even when the world doesn’t.
That’s what the Rootstick Tide Wands are for.
They are more than found objects bound in yarn and memory. These wands are power objects—handmade instruments for those standing at the threshold between what was and what will be. Each one is crafted intuitively, using driftwood, discarded utensils, feathers, selenite, bones, and beach-swept beads. Materials that have already crossed boundaries, survived the elements, and returned ready to be transformed.
I began making them after moon-charging a collection of selenite under the Strawberry Moon. The energy was palpable. I didn’t plan it. I just knew: now is the time. The wands came together quickly, as if they’d been waiting.
They’re meant to be used. For clearing space. For holding intention. For witnessing grief. For marking the sacred. For tethering ourselves when we feel unmoored.
Each wand is a guide for liminal rites—the inner ceremonies we perform when words fail, when the world shifts, when the soul needs a signal fire. In my hands, they’ve become companions. In yours, they may become portals.
If you’re moving through a threshold—call in what you need. Let the wand speak. Let it guide you home to yourself.
There’s something deeply satisfying about revealing what’s hidden underneath. The textures, the ghost marks, the traces of past gestures—they all come forward in unexpected ways. It’s like the surface tells its own story once you lift the top layer away.
Inspired by the lush vegetation found on my rainforest property, I wove single-use bottle caps into vines and flowers to reflects the vibrant colors and intricate patterns of vines, orchids, Heliconias, and Birds of Paradise that surround me.
Now on display at Fiberart International 2025 through August 30 2025 at Brew House Arts; 711 S 21st Pittsburgh, PA.
Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody Woven bottlecaps vines on blue and white polyurethane rope and paracord draped on rolling Z rack. 79 x 12 x 72 in 2023
The Rootstick Tide Wands began under the luminous gaze of the Strawberry Moon. That night, I placed my selenite out to charge under the moonlight. By morning, I felt an undeniable pull—like the materials themselves were asking to be gathered. Driftwood and discarded spatulas. Feathers, coral, bones. Beads and buttons waiting to be strung. I listened. I followed the current. And I began to make.
These wands are not ornamental. They are ritual tools—conduits for renewal, rebirth, and release. Each one is wrapped with intention and woven from the thresholds between land and sea, spirit and body, memory and motion.
Reading The Way of the Eight Winds by Nigel Pennick helped me name what I was already feeling: that each wand aligns with directional energies. North for stillness. East for new breath. South for fire and transformation. West for the tides we release into. These elemental currents are embedded in every fiber, shell, and knot.
The tarot’s Eight of Wands captures the same urgency I felt while making them—swift movement, decisive action, a rush of spiritual momentum. These are wands for those standing at a threshold. For those who know it’s time to let go, call something in, or begin again.
Each wand holds charged selenite and moonlight. Each wand is a spell. A signal. A tether to the unseen forces moving us forward.
If you feel called, trust the pull. The wind doesn’t wait.
Rhapsody Wrapped in Blues began with a question from a child.
During my January residency with the Miami Children’s Museum, one young visitor asked if we could use pipe cleaners on the cart. That moment of curiosity stayed with me. There was something so tender in the request—something playful, intuitive, and wise. It cracked open a new way of thinking about material, and I began wrapping the child-sized shopping cart with pipe cleaners soon after.
The color palette, however, was already whispering to me—shaped by the books I’d been reading, each a meditation on memory, grief, and the enduring presence of Black life.
Rhapsody Wrapped in Blues: Emotional Baggage Cart Small metal shopping cart, pipe cleaners, faux fur, 12 yards ribbon, pom poms 10.5 x 8 x 12 in 2025
Imani Perry’s Black in Blues reminded me that blue is more than a color; it’s a carrier of ancestral sorrow and sonic resistance. In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, I found language for the feeling of constantly living with the residue of catastrophe—of mourning that doesn’t end. That wake lives in the soft textures of the faux fur, the tangle of pipe cleaners, the miles of ribbon.
Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother haunted my hands as I wrapped each bar of the cart. I imagined the women she walked with, the ruptures she named. Judith Carney’s In the Shadow of Slavery reminded me of the sacred knowledge carried through seeds and roots. These readings weren’t just research—they were spirit guides.
I also carried the wisdom of Braiding Sweetgrass—Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for reciprocal relationship with the natural world—and Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, which taught me how an object can become a vessel for remembrance when language fails.
Together, these stories, these materials, and that one child’s question converged.
Rhapsody Wrapped in Blues is a power object disguised in softness. A rolling vessel. A visual blues ballad made from pipe cleaners, pom poms, faux fur, and 12 yards of ribbon. It holds the weight of what we carry—from the microaggressions we’re taught to swallow, to the ancestral griefs that linger in our DNA.
It’s playful. It’s painful. It’s both.
Because sometimes healing begins when we let a child’s question guide us toward our own.
