Hello from Sky Garden Studio
The Ritual of Cleaning
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.
Cotton Season
It is cotton season on St. Croix.
Along roadsides and shorelines, yellow wild cotton flowers rise from the brush, soft, resilient, unassuming. Survivors from the island’s plantation past, they grow without asking to be seen. Hiding in plain sight, the cotton carries a memory that never left the land. Its presence is so familiar it is often overlooked. Most people drive by. I stop.
This cotton holds ancestral knowledge. It remembers hands before mine, hands that picked, cleaned, spun, and carried this fiber through lives shaped by pain, endurance, and ingenuity. The plant persists not as monument, but as quiet inheritance. The land keeps the lesson.
When I collect the fibers, I do so with care and intention, aware that this plant once shaped lives, landscapes, and economies. What remains now is not the plantation, but the cotton itself, still growing, still offering. I gather slowly, listening. Later, in the studio, I clean and spin the fibers into string, coaxing continuity from what was nearly forgotten. The motion is circular, meditative. Lint by linters, the past moves forward through my hands.
Each strand becomes a quiet conversation between land and hand, past and present. The cotton is no longer a remnant; it becomes material for repair, for remembering, for transformation.
This is not nostalgia. It is transmission, a way of honoring what was carried, what survived, and what still teaches. The cotton does not belong to history alone. It belongs to now: to breath, to making, to memory still in motion.
Exhibitions Closing & Opening This Month
January is a moment of transition; an opportunity to catch work as it closes and to step into what’s just beginning. This month, two exhibitions featuring my work come to a close, while a new exhibition opens shortly after. If you’re able to visit, I hope you’ll take advantage of these moments.
Closing This Month
Meltdown: A Changing Climate
ArtsWestchester Galleries | White Plains, NY
October 12, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Meltdown: A Changing Climate brings together artists responding to the accelerating impacts of climate change and environmental instability. Through material, process, and form, the exhibition examines ecological vulnerability, resilience, and human responsibility in an era of environmental crisis.
Learn more ›
Interpretations 2025
Visions Museum of Textile Art | San Diego, CA
October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
Interpretations 2025 showcases innovative contemporary textile works that push the boundaries of fiber, materiality, and narrative. The exhibition coincides with Interpretations 2025 Festival Days, which included artist talks, awards, and community gatherings celebrating excellence in contemporary textile art.
Opening This Month
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths
Cummings Art Galleries, Connecticut College | New London, CT
January 20 – March 6, 2026
Opening Reception: January 26, 2026
Curated by nico w. okoro
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths dismantles social constructs of race, space, and place, examining the enduring legacies of colonialism that shape lived experience. Through material and conceptual practices, the exhibition imagines borders not as fixed lines, but as contested and transformative spaces.
I’ll be in town for the opening reception and would love to connect—please reach out if you’re planning to attend.
Marking a Year of Remembering
This week marks one year since my father’s passing, November 22.
In that time, there have been so many milestones without him: his birthday, my birthday, holidays that felt quieter, thinner somehow. Each one has been a reminder of his absence, but also of the love and ritual that remain.
I’ve been working through the loss with my Mummy Bear series; a practice that began long before he died, when his memory started to fade. Every year since, I’ve created a new bear as an act of remembrance, a way to preserve our bond through my hands. What began as grief work has evolved into something larger, a visual language for love, memory, and transformation.
Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It loops and unravels, it knots itself into the fabric of daily life. As I approach this anniversary, I find myself both heavy and grateful, for the years we had, for the ritual of making, for the quiet ways art holds what words cannot.
Each Mummy Bear is a conversation between what was and what remains. In the knotting, the wrapping, the layering, I find him, and, in some small way, find myself again.
Rediscovering Sari Dienes — Gratitude for My YouTube MFA
I am having one of those bittersweet, full-circle moments, the kind where disappointment and delight show up holding hands.
While going deep down the rabbit hole researching altered tins and assemblage artists, I landed on not one, but two videos about Sari Dienes. And suddenly I was hit with a realization:
How did I forget her?
I know I’ve seen Sari’s work before, likely in some New York museum or gallery when I was a teenager roaming the city hungry for art, I didn’t yet have language for. I remember being struck by her permission to use anything, flattened tin cans, driftwood, street rubbings, debris, as treasured material. Her rhythm felt familiar. Like a cousin I didn’t know I had.
And yet… I never truly clocked her. She was buried somewhere in the unlabeled vault of “things I’ve seen that shaped me before I knew they had.”
So yes, I am disappointed in myself for not being conscious of that connection earlier. For not honoring an influence sooner. For all the times I’ve spoken about assemblage without saying her name.
But oh, how grateful I am to meet her again now, not as a teenager looking up at art, but as an artist looking sideways across time, recognizing a fellow traveler.
This is why I thankful to the University of YouTube. My YouTube MFA studies are ongoing and fully immersive. Tuition is free but the tuition cost is humility, the willingness to admit that everything I think I know must be periodically burned down to make room for what I do not yet know.
I am learning to surrender certainty. To let curiosity guide me instead of credentials.
So here I am, deep in the tin shrine, reliquary, assemblage wormhole, and Sari Dienes has entered the chat like a long-lost friend tapping me on the shoulder saying:
“I’ve been waiting for you to notice.”
And now that I have, I’m listening.
Between Rain and Ripening
While life Stateside begins to slow for winter, here in St. Croix the pace is quickening. Fall and winter are our busy months, visitors arriving, holiday parties unfolding, fruits ripening faster than I can harvest them. The rainy season is in full swing; the orchids are blooming, and both the Java Plum and Coco Plum trees are heavy with fruit. Some of the mango trees, stubborn and generous, are still producing too.
I’ve started gathering mahogany seed pods for future art projects, each one a small promise of what’s to come. The seasonal residents will soon be back, which means restaurant reservations will become competitive sport. And yet, all I want to do is nest in the studio. I have nine works in progress waiting for my hands, plus a handful of new ideas elbowing their way to the front of the line.
I had hoped to spend this season reflecting on growth and gratitude, but truthfully, I’m feeling overwhelmed. There’s a certain kind of fullness that comes with this time of year, a lushness that’s both beautiful and demanding. The rain feeds everything at once: the fruit, the flowers, the ideas, the obligations.
Maybe that’s its own kind of gratitude, to be overflowing with possibilities, even when there aren’t enough hours in the day.
I Make Meaning
I’ve come to understand that my work isn’t just about creating objects. It’s about memory, materiality, and spirit. Everything I make; wrapped, woven, knotted, scavenged, stitched, or adorned, is a form of testimony, offering, and witnessing. I don’t work in isolation. I work in collaboration with community, ancestors, with land and water, with discarded things, with stories people have tried to bury.
My relationship with spirit has never followed a straight line. I was raised Unitarian and only recently learned that my father served as a Deacon in the Episcopal Church. That discovery reframed things I didn’t know I was carrying. And earlier this year, when I traveled to Rome on pilgrimage with McCarty, I received a series of quiet but undeniable signs pulling me toward a deeper, more embodied practice of faith. Not about labels, but about ritual, remembrance, and devotion.
I don’t separate that calling from my art. My materials, marine debris, fibers, beads, plastics, hair, ephemera are more than tools. They are archives. They hold grief, joy, migration, violence, survival, and protection. The transformation isn’t about erasing what was, it’s about uncovering it and letting it speak in a new form.
My practice is also a form of resistance. I confront microaggressions and the everyday cuts of bias through the act of making. Knotting is meditation. Weaving is reclamation. Wrapping is healing. Vessel building is ancestral technology. What some see as trash, I treat as evidence and essence, of impact, erasure, resilience, and spirit.
I am a community builder as much as I am an artist. I don’t create in isolation, I create in relation. Through workshops, mentorship, storytelling, and gathering, I make space for others to root into their own narratives. My studio residency, Sky Garden STX isn’t just a place, it’s a sanctuary in motion, a land-based altar, a future site for remembrance and making.
In the studio, intuition and ritual live side by side. A shell can hold memory. A piece of rope can hold history. A found object can become a portal. I don’t see my evolving faith as a departure from anything I’ve been, only as another thread in the braid, intertwined with ancestral memory, folk wisdom, and the quiet instructions of the materials themselves.
If there’s a throughline in everything I do, it is this:
I remember forward.
I work with what others overlook.
I build from what has been broken.
I create portals where stories can live again.
I don’t just make work.
I make meaning.
And I make room, for what has been, what is becoming, and what is calling me next.
Classic LBD & Boa Quill
This October, I’m honored to share two deeply personal works, Classic LBD and Boa Quill, at the Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY. Both pieces reflect my ongoing exploration of how beauty, adornment, and protection intersect in the face of microaggressions.
- Classic LBD reimagines the iconic little black dress as armor, turning a fashion staple into a shield against the daily cuts of bias.
- Boa Quill asks: If I adorned myself in a feather boa made of zip ties, would you still come for me in the same way? Here, materials usually associated with containment become symbols of defiance and resilience.
These works connect to my larger practice, including the Blackity Black Blanket Ladders, woven monuments of reclaimed materials that honor Black resilience by transforming the weight of microaggressions into visible, collective testimony. Together, they stand as reminders that what was meant to harm can also be reshaped into protection, beauty, and joy.
Theda Sandiford
100′ of slip half hitched chain black glitter 1/4” cotton rope, knotted with ribbon, recycled sari ribbon, acrylic yarn, pearls and 8” zip ties on bamboo ring.
60 x 14 x 4 in
2021
Theda Sandiford
Recycled fishing net, ribbon, paracord and handmade jewelry on dressform
46 x 20 x 6 in
2020
Blackity Black Blanket Ladders
Interpretations 2025
Dates: October 17, 2025 -January 10, 2026
Location: Visions Museum of Textile Art; 2825 Dewey Rd #100, San Diego, CA
Blackity Black Blanket, Ladders is part of a larger installation composed of handwoven blankets made from over 500,000 zip ties. These sculptural blankets envelop every piece of furniture in a studio apartment—transforming a chaise lounge, dining table, and four chairs into tactile monuments of resilience, resistance, and protection. In this piece, ladders wrapped in dense layers of zip ties become symbols of aspiration burdened by the weight of bias and systemic friction.
This work explores implicit bias and the complexities of unproductive dialogues around sensitive “isms.” Implicit bias is a universal human experience—not a moral failure, but an invitation to self-awareness. Recognizing bias doesn’t make someone bad; the key lies in what we choose to do with that awareness. This body of work viscerally portrays the relentless impact of microaggressions. The ladders—tools meant for climbing—are draped in heavy, fur-like armor that both conceals and reveals the tension of attempting to rise while being held down by invisible assumptions.
The blankets themselves are not vessels of rest or softness; they are armor. A second skin. Bristling with a fur-like texture, they warn as much as they protect. Constructed from a material commonly associated with containment and restraint, the zip ties are reclaimed and reworked into something that defends, disrupts, and demands to be seen.
The installation reimagines what it’s like to live with microaggressions—so persistent that their sting becomes disturbingly familiar. In this space, even pain is woven into the fabric of daily life. The irony is that the discomfort, the tension, begins to feel like home. This work doesn’t offer easy comfort; instead, it challenges viewers to sit with that discomfort, to confront their own biases, and to join in the collective work of empathy, equity, and healing.