Category: Ramblings

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The Last 25 Percent

My solo exhibition, The Offering, opens at Cane Roots Art Gallery on November 19.

That is less than a month away, and for the first time, I am not already finished.

Usually, by this point, every work would be complete or close enough that I could see the entire exhibition clearly. The remaining weeks would be for photographing, documenting, labeling, packing, and worrying about details no one else will ever notice.

This time, I am about 75 percent there.

The final 25 percent is proving to be the hardest.

Since moving to St. Croix, I move more slowly, in the studio and in my life. The island has changed my sense of time. Heat changes the pace. Rain interrupts a plan. Light shifts across the valley. A bird calls from somewhere I cannot see. Materials need to be gathered, cleaned, sorted, dried, and lived with before they reveal what they want to become.

I am learning that moving slowly is not the same as standing still.

The work is happening, even when my hands are quiet. I am noticing. Listening. Walking the land. Collecting fragments. Waiting for an object, an idea, or a memory to tell me where it belongs.

But I would be lying if I said I am completely comfortable with this slower rhythm.

There is still a deadline. The gallery walls are waiting. The calendar keeps moving, even when I do not. Some days, the unfinished work feels full of possibility. Other days, it feels like a question I should already know how to answer.

The first 75 percent carried momentum. Ideas arrived quickly. Materials found one another. Forms began to emerge. This final stretch requires something different. It asks me to make decisions; to cut, attach, remove, complete, and let go.

Finishing means choosing what the work will be instead of continuing to imagine everything it could become.

Perhaps that is why the last 25 percent feels so difficult.

The Offering is rooted in attention: attention to the land, to memory, to what has been discarded, and to what remains. The exhibition brings together objects and gestures shaped by repair, ritual, witnessing, and transformation. It asks what we carry, what we return, and what we might offer back.

I cannot make work about attention while rushing past what the work is asking of me.

So I am trying to trust this pace, even as the opening approaches. I am returning to the studio each day and allowing the work to arrive through repetition: wrapping, weaving, knotting, sorting, stitching, undoing, and beginning again.

Maybe I am not behind.

Maybe I am inside the most demanding part of the process, the place where intention must become form.

On November 19, the doors will open at Cane Roots Art Gallery. The work will leave the privacy of my studio and enter into conversation with other bodies, memories, and ways of seeing.

Until then, I will keep listening.

There is still work to do.

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Sometimes, Adaption is the Work

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to stay open while several projects are moving at once. I am preparing for upcoming exhibitions, developing new work, experimenting with unfamiliar materials, and returning to ideas that have been waiting for my attention.

Some works have required me to reconsider their scale, structure, or materials. Others have asked me to slow down and listen more closely to what the work wants to become. A stalled project is not always a failure. Sometimes it simply needs more time, a different approach, or another set of hands and eyes.

I’m learning that adaptation is not merely a response to the work, sometimes, adaptation is the work. Whether I am braiding rope, making paper, gathering natural materials, or creating space for community participation, changing course can reveal possibilities I could not see when I began.

The creative process is rarely a straight line. It is an ongoing practice of noticing, adjusting, and trusting that even unfinished work has something to teach us.

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Inviting Discovery

My work begins with familiar materials and forms, hair, rope, weaving, found objects, seed pods, marine debris but invites viewers to move beyond first impressions. What initially appears as craft, ritual, or environmental assemblage gradually reveals layered narratives about race, memory, labor, colonial histories, and the invisible systems that shape identity. Rather than concealing meaning through coded imagery, the work rewards sustained looking, allowing deeper histories and social realities to emerge through material, process, and participation.

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A Conversation on Salvage

recently had the pleasure of joining SALVAGE podcast host Natalya Khorover for a conversation about my studio practice, collecting, and the stories embedded in discarded materials.

We talked about growing up making jewelry from shells found on the beach, how that childhood curiosity evolved into a practice centered on salvaged rope, marine debris, and found objects, and why I believe materials carry memory. We also explored community healing through participatory art, the role of repetition and meditation in my work, and the joy (and occasional obsession) of collecting treasures that most people would walk right past.

The conversation wandered through everything from bottle caps and broken glass to paper dolls, sewing patterns, my upcoming exhibition Salvage, Witness & Repair, and the artist residency I’m building in St. Croix. It was a thoughtful discussion about repair, material culture, and why sometimes the things we discard have the most compelling stories to tell.

If you’re curious about my process, or if you’ve ever picked something up off the ground and wondered what it could become, I think you’ll enjoy this conversation.

LISTEN

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Small Move, Huge Opening

Last year, when I moved into my studio space, I placed my desk where it seemed to make the most sense at the time. But almost immediately, I felt it was wrong.

Not dramatically wrong. Just… off.

For over a year, I kept thinking I should move it, but like many things in a working studio, I adapted and kept going. There was always another project, another pile, another experiment in progress.

A few weeks ago, I finally moved it.

What started as a simple decision to reposition my desk somehow turned into shifting the false wall attached to it, moving storage, reorganizing shelves, and changing the entire flow of the room. Technically, I only gained about four by twelve feet of studio space, but the shift feels far larger than the actual measurement.

It feels like an opening.

The office area is only slightly smaller, but the studio breathes differently now. Light moves differently. I move differently inside it. There’s more room to think, to spread out, to see connections that somehow felt hidden before.

And since making the adjustment, I’ve been working like a fiend.

Something clicked into place.

While reorganizing, I uncovered unfinished works tucked behind shelves and buried beneath years of materials. Some of these pieces suddenly feel incredibly relevant to where I am now as an artist. Ideas I once struggled to resolve now seem to be speaking more clearly. I’m returning to them with fresh understanding, new energy, and a deeper trust in where they want to go.

At the same time, materials keep jumping out at me asking to be used differently.

Old fishing rope wants to become roots. Plastic fragments start suggesting flowers. Seed pods, rusted metal, marine debris, fabric scraps, bottle caps, cordage, dried vines, broken objects I’ve carried around for years, they all seem to be entering into new conversations with one another.

My studio has always been experimental. My ideas have ideas.

But lately the work feels especially alive. One material leads to another, which sparks an entirely different direction, which then circles back to an old project waiting patiently for me to finally understand it.

I’m experimenting constantly right now, combining hoarded materials accumulated over decades with natural and unnatural finds foraged here in St. Croix. Some things are becoming sculptural. Some are becoming installations. Some are simply strange tests teaching me new ways to think through making.

It’s interesting how such a small adjustment, simply moving a desk, could create such a large internal and creative shift.

Sometimes all it takes is a new opening.

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Octopus Work

The studio has been loud lately, not in sound, but in pull.

I’m working across multiple series at once, moving from one piece to another, then back again. Rope on one table. Foraged material drying in the corner. A vessel half-bound. A line of thought that won’t sit still. It feels a little ADHD in the studio, attention splitting, doubling back, chasing sparks before they cool.

It’s a gift and a curse.

Focus, for me, doesn’t look like a straight line. It looks like orbit. One piece unlocks another. Finishing something doesn’t close it, it opens a door. I’ll tie off one work and immediately see where it wants to go next. So I follow it, even if it means holding five things at once.

Right now, I’m in that stretch, finishing, resolving, pushing pieces to their edge while new ideas keep interrupting. I don’t fight it. I work like an octopus, reaching, holding, testing, building across everything all at once.

All of it is moving toward my solo show at Cane Roots Gallery in Christiansted, opening later this year. The work is rooted here, in St. Croix. New rhythms. New materials. New material histories. What the land offers. What the sea leaves behind. What the island reveals over time.

There are not enough hours in the day to bring every idea into the light. I’ve had to accept that. Some things will wait. Some will evolve. Some will never be made and that’s part of the practice too.

But what is here, what is becoming, is enough.

Each piece carries the imprint of this moment of working in motion, of holding many threads, of trusting that even in the scatter, there is a pattern forming.

I just have to keep my hands in it.

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The Work Beneath the Work

There is a kind of work that happens before the work.

It doesn’t photograph well.
It doesn’t post.
It doesn’t announce itself as progress.

It looks like walking.
Reading.
Sitting with something that hasn’t found its form yet.

It looks like silence.

I’ve learned not to rush that space anymore.
The in-between is not empty.
It’s where things are rearranging—quietly, stubbornly, beneath the surface.

For a long time, I thought sustaining a creative life meant producing constantly.
Keeping pace.
Keeping up.

But that’s not what holds.

What holds is the ability to return.
To come back to the work without ceremony.
Without perfection.
Without waiting to feel ready.

To return when it’s unclear.
When it’s slow.
When it feels like nothing is happening.

Because something is always happening.

These days, I ask myself simpler questions:
What is my practice asking of me right now?
What is the smallest way I can show up today?

And I listen.

Making room has become part of the work.
Not a pause from it,
but the place where it begins.

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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

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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.