I used to believe productivity and my creativity were at war with each other, that structure belonged to the corporate world, and creativity lived everywhere else. But the more I lean into my studio practice, the clearer it becomes: productivity isn’t the opposite of creativity; it’s what protects it.
Stepping back from a 9–5 has given me the room to see this truth more clearly. Yes, I’m still juggling corporate consulting commitments, but I do that work with intention, so I can pour more energy into my art, build out Sky Garden Residency programming, and finally apply to artist residencies I simply didn’t have time for before.
What I’m learning is that structure creates possibility.
A calendar, a to-do list, a weekly rhythm… These aren’t constraints, they’re scaffolding. They hold space for experimentation, ritual, rest, and the slow research my work needs.
This season is about making room: room to weave and wander, room to say yes to opportunities that nourish me, room to deepen community and make the kind of art that takes time.
If productivity gives me that room, I’ll embrace it, gratefully.
I’m excited to be participating in this year’s Great Mangrove Cleanup at Altona Lagoon, a day of caring for coastal ecosystems while removing marine debris from the mangroves.
Hosted by the University of the Virgin Islands and the Department of Planning and Natural Resources, these cleanups have removed over 26 tons of debris from mangrove forests across the territory since 2018. I love that this work supports the environment and creates space for thoughtful reuse of ocean-recovered materials in my art practice.
Saturday, February 21, 2026 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM Altona Lagoon, St. Croix
If you’d like to join me, whether to give back, or simply spend time caring for the land and water, I’d love to see you.
This evolving sculptural work emerges from recovered marine line, sea-tumbled and woven with my Aunt Terry’s yellow baby yarn, entangling care, loss, and inheritance. Rooted in the Atlantic as a water grave, it imagines what might form if those taken by the ocean did not vanish, but transformed, absorbed into marine systems, reshaped by pressure, time, and survival.
Built from hurricane-recovered debris, hair, shells, and industrial fragments, the work treats mutation as a strategy rather than a wound. It is not a fixed memorial, but a living anatomy in progress, an offering that shifts as memory settles, asking the ocean to be read not only as a site of rupture, but as an active, generative archive.
Bridge Art Gallery – Anniversary Opening, February 21
On February 21, Expressive Creative Soul celebrates its 10-Year Anniversary at Bridge Art Gallery, a milestone that means so much to me.
Although I won’t be able to attend in person, I will absolutely be there in spirit.
Bridge Art Gallery has been a meaningful supporter along my artistic journey. They have made space for work that is layered, socially engaged, and rooted in lived experience. They have believed in my voice and in the stories embedded in my materials. That kind of sustained support is not small, it is formative.
To be included in this anniversary exhibition feels like standing inside a shared history of courage and creative commitment.
I am honored that Wonder Women Tapestry and Wonder Woman Selfie will be featured as part of this celebration.
Wonder Women Tapestry
Created in 2018 through a series of sewing circles, Wonder Women Tapestry is a 120” x 96” collective offering. Friends, friends of friends, and even strangers off the street gathered to stitch beads, bottle caps, mirrors, and embroidered details into its surface.
The tapestry carries the energy of many hands. It honors Black womanhood not as fantasy, but as lived heroism—resilient, radiant, and communal.
Wonder Woman Selfie
Wonder Woman Selfie turns the lens inward. It is about self-representation and the power of claiming our own iconography. It asks what it means for a Black woman to frame herself as powerful—to define the narrative rather than inherit it.
Together, these works speak to community and self-definition, to gathering and to claiming space.
A Decade of Impact
For ten years, Expressive Creative Soul has uplifted artists who lead with story, culture, and truth. That consistency matters. That commitment shapes careers.
I am deeply grateful to Christopher and Cheryl Mack for their vision and for walking alongside artists with integrity and heart.
While I may not be physically present on February 21, know that my gratitude, my spirit, and my celebration are fully there.
Congratulations to Bridge Art Gallery on 10 powerful years. May the next decade be even bolder.
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.
