Tag: Ramblings

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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.

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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.