a poem by Theda Sandiford
The Long Rising
Between Shore and Source
In this world,
we move as pilgrims,
marked by water,
walking the thin edge
between dust and forever.
The waters recognize us,
ancient, patient,
older than our names.
We are drawn, like the moon,
toward what first gave us breath.
When the waves rise,
they do not threaten.
They beckon.
a remembering,
a call we’ve heard before.
Here, surrender is not loss.
It is released.
A yielding that leads
not to vanishing,
but to return.
Currents carry us
back toward mercy,
back toward the place
where beginnings still wait.
As rivers loosen their grip
and open into the sea,
so we learn to let go
of what weighs the soul.
In the depths,
there is no striving.
Only rest.
And in the quiet heart of the waters,
we are gathered,
held,
and made whole.
a poem by Theda Sandiford
Making Space for the Work That Matters
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.
Textiles as Testimony: Creative Activism, Memory and Making
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,
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.
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.
Nesting Into Inspiration
This month has been a season of settling in, creating, and reconnecting with my practice. I’ve been nesting in my studio, opening long-forgotten boxes, sorting materials, and rediscovering treasures that feel like gifts waiting to be transformed. There’s something grounding about this process of organizing and making space; each thread, each object, reminds me of where I’ve been and what’s possible.
Hurricane season has brought its own rhythm. The rains return, streams carve their paths through the property, uncovering shards of pottery and even revealing waterfalls. We’ve been clearing walking paths to open up the waterfall that flows between our home and the residency property, a reminder of how nature constantly reshapes and uncovers what is hidden.
I’ve been cutting back invasive vines, and soon their fibers will find their way into my work. I’ve also been upcycling rope, fabric, and leftover yarn into the beginnings of new projects that are slowly, patiently coming together. When the power goes out and I’m forced to shelter in place, I take it as an invitation to slow down, to listen, and to let the work unfold at its own pace.
In this season, I’m learning again that inspiration isn’t something to chase. It emerges naturally, like streams after the rain, if I make space, clear the path, and let it flow.
August Reflections: Rediscovering Time Capsules
August has been a month of introspection and growth. I’ve been returning to old techniques with fresh eyes, particularly 2D mixed media works on paper. For a recent birthday activation, I created a series of Masquerade Masks and found myself diving deep into my archive, sorting through old monoprints, tissue prints, handmade papers, magazine tears, postcards, early collages, and ephemera I had tucked away and forgotten.
In the process, I stumbled across a time capsule I set aside in 1995. Inside were treasures I hadn’t expected: rare photos of my father smiling, fragments of memory, and traces of ideas that still pulse through my work today. What once felt like discarded experiments now read as early whispers of themes that continue to guide me; ancestral spiritual practices, cosmic geometry, abstraction, African masks, adornment, and divine intervention.
Funny how time reshapes our perspective. Works that seemed incomplete years ago now feel like essential threads in my practice. The textures, patterns, and iconography I once set aside have returned, asking to be seen anew, insisting on their place in the conversation of my work.
I am still processing these rediscoveries, letting memory and material speak. I look forward to seeing how my hands guide me as these old forms weave themselves into the present moment.
Illuminations and New Sight
Ever since I got my new reading glasses, I’ve been powering through my reading list with fresh eyes, literally and spiritually. This morning, I finished Illuminations by Mary Sharratt, a luminous novel about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic, composer, healer, and visionary.
Her story is so inspiring. Hildegard’s fierce devotion to divine creativity, her bold voice in a patriarchal world, and her communion with the natural world, echo so much of what I’ve been reaching for in my own practice. Her visions, wild, vivid, unapologetically feminine, remind me that there is sacred power in speaking what only you can see.
Hildegard’s legacy is a radiant thread in the life I’m building now, of ritual, plant medicine, and ancestral memory. I didn’t expect a book to shift my inner tempo, but Illuminations has done just that. More soon. There’s work to do in the garden.
Theda
