Category: Work In Progress

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The Long Return: Revisiting Unfinished Work in 2026

As I look toward 2026, I am entering a new, yet deeply familiar chapter in my studio practice. I am calling it Ritual Completion. This body of work began not with a new idea, but with a long-delayed act: finally unpacking and sorting through the last of the studio boxes shipped from New Jersey to St. Croix more than two years ago.

What I thought would be a practical task, unpacking, sorting, repacking, quickly became something else. As I handled old mixed-media works, studies, and experiments, I began pulling a few pieces aside. Not to archive them away again, but to return to them. The work asked to be revisited.

For years, my studio has quietly held the evidence of curiosity: half-finished works, abandoned studies, experiments paused mid-breath. Works on paper folded into drawers. Mono prints stacked and forgotten. Collage papers and Xerox cutouts saved from earlier projects. Materials gathered with intention and optimism, then set aside when time, energy, or clarity moved elsewhere.

Ideas have never been in short supply. They arrive through late-night YouTube deep dives, doom scrolling on Instagram, gallery visits, art fairs, and long conversations with other artists. There is always a new technique to try, a new material to incorporate. These side quests don’t always yield results and sometimes they do, beyond my wildest imagination. Many became projects that taught me something essential, even if they never arrived where I initially thought they were headed.

Rather than seeing these works as incomplete, I am now seeing them as waiting.

This new practice is about returning, slowly and deliberately to those moments. I am revisiting old mixed-media experiments with a new eye, informed by years of making, living, grieving, healing, and unlearning. Some pieces will finally be finished. Others will be pushed further than I ever intended, just to see what breaks open, what resists, what transforms. Some will utterly fail and that, too, is part of the work.

Alongside these revisited pieces are the materials I have been collecting for decades:
Altoid tins. Cigar boxes. Candle lids. Tin cans. Milk pull tabs. Bread tags. Can tabs. Broken toys and fragments of jewelry. Bottle caps. Wrapping paper, old cards, tissue paper, grocery mesh. Objects rescued from daily life and held in quiet conversation with future possibility.

These materials have always felt like witnesses, small, humble moments of time and touch. In this season, I am honoring them by finally inviting them into form: vessels for remembering, devotion, release, and becoming.

This practice is not about productivity or clearing space for the sake of order. It is about intention. About listening again. About allowing unfinished ideas to complete themselves or to teach me why they couldn’t before. It is a ritual of closure, continuation, and permission.

There is something deeply healing in acknowledging that not everything needs to be new to be meaningful. Sometimes the most honest work comes from returning to what we once left behind, carrying it forward with tenderness instead of judgment.

As 2026 unfolds, I will be sharing moments from this process—what gets completed, what gets transformed, and what surprises me along the way.

Stay tuned.

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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.

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Work In Progress: Swallowed Silence

Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled and salt-worn, is my starting point for this vessel. I wove and knotted the rope with yarn, letting each twist carry memory, frustration, and resilience. What emerged is not just an object, but a container for the silences I’ve had to swallow.

This piece speaks to the moments when ideas were dismissed until repeated by another voice, suddenly valid, but no longer mine. It embodies the raw tension of being unseen, unheard, and undervalued. Every knot becomes both a reminder and a refusal, binding what was silenced into something visible, undeniable.

The vessel is tangled, resilient, and true. It carries the weight of memory while resisting erasure. Like the marine line itself, once discarded, now recovered and remade, it is a testament to survival and transformation.

Alongside the work, I wrote this haiku:

Sea-tumbled cord knotted,
swallowed silence made visible,
resistance holds fast.

Together, the poem and the vessel create a net of memory and resistance—an offering of truth that can no longer be unseen.

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Twisted Witness: Work In Progress

So far, I’ve been working with recovered marine line, sea tumbled, woven and knotted with yarn and hand made cordage. Next, I move on too beading and button embellishment.

Each twist channels the raw tension of being dismissed,
of time stolen by those who don’t listen,
of vision ignored until echoed by another voice,
suddenly heard, suddenly valid,
but not mine.

This vessel holds that frustration.
It binds the silence I am forced to swallow
into something visible, undeniable,
a net of memory and resistance,
tangled, resilient, and true.

Recovered marine line, sea tumbled, woven and knotted with yarn and hand made cordage.
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Rootstick Tide Wands Currently In Flow

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.

A channel. A gathering. A release.

Wood, yarn, jute, acrylic paint, deer bones, selenite, shells, buttons, beads, bells, pearls
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Breathe

the breath

of the ocean

connect

with cycles

of life

death

In her name

we find

creation’s embrace

infinite tides

Each wave a breath

Each breath a life

By Theda Sandiford

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WIP: Celestial Nexus

This artwork, crafted from three-ply cotton glitter rope, intricately knotted and wrapped with eyelash yarn, embroidery floss, and crystal beads, forms the foundational layer of a spiritual altar. Designed to harmonize with feathers, shells, and a bowl of water, it amplifies elemental energies to create a sacred space for reflection, connection, and renewal.

Its circular form embodies the cyclical nature of life and the continuous flow of energy, symbolizing the infinite interplay between air and water. The shimmering materials catch and reflect light, evoking sunlight filtering through shifting clouds or the unseen yet ever-present currents of wind moving through the atmosphere. This piece invites a meditative engagement, weaving together elements of nature and spirit into a unified, radiant whole.