My practice begins with a question: how do we carry who we have been into who we are becoming?

I am interested in the ways people make meaning of a life — how we remember who we have been, what we carry forward, and what we leave behind in the objects we make, the rooms we inhabit, the stories we tell, and the rituals we repeat. I work across painting, drawing, print, collage, textile, stitch, beadwork, and dimensional form to investigate how cultural memory is held: in images, in materials, in ritual, and in the spaces we make for ourselves.

I am a Black woman, and many of the stories I tell emerge from that history and that visual world. The women in my work often resemble me, my family, or women I have known and imagined. The questions inside the work extend further. I am interested in the human process of becoming, and in the ways culture, memory, beauty, difficulty, and ordinary life become part of who we are.

I am drawn to the evidence people leave behind. A silhouette. A profile. A vessel. A quilt. A photograph. A pattern repeated across generations. Cultures have used images, symbols, textiles, ceramics, stories, and domestic objects to say: we were here, this mattered to us, this is what we carried.

Those histories enter the work alongside contemporary life. My figures often occupy several times at once. A woman sits quietly with a cup of tea, claiming a moment of rest and her own time, while a silhouette or repeated symbol reaches back toward an older visual language — ancient Egyptian imagery, African forms, early Christian and Byzantine iconography, systems in which a simplified profile or gesture could communicate identity and belonging. The past appears beside her not as something she has escaped, but as something still present in who she is becoming.

Rest, contemplation, and the deliberate reclaiming of one's time are part of the histories I want to tell. The women in my work are not present only as witnesses to hardship, nor are they defined solely through resistance. They rest. They gather. They decorate rooms. They sit quietly. They remember. A room may be refuge, memory, sanctuary — or restriction. I am interested in how women inhabit, reclaim, and transform those spaces rather than treating enclosure as their condition.

Lately those rooms have become boxes. Cages. Structures of glass and cloth that a figure sits inside and can be seen through. I am thinking of Maya Angelou's caged bird, and of women I have known, and of myself. A box may preserve something or limit it; a transparent structure may reveal and protect at the same time. The women in these works are suspended just at the precipice of freedom, and their rooms hold the moment immediately before it. What interests me is not the enclosure but its edge — the point at which a space that once sheltered someone becomes a space she has outgrown.

Flowers return throughout the work. They began intuitively and became a language. They turn the figure toward the world beyond herself — toward season, growth, fragility, and the necessity of noticing what is still alive. They are a reminder that beauty and difficulty can occupy the same room.

A piece begins with a pocket of inspiration — a story starter. A spoon. From there I follow the repetition of a pattern, or the beauty of a hand. My studio practice is a conversation between materials. I draw, paint, print, collage, stitch, quilt, bead, layer, and suspend. A drawing may become a print, move into cloth, be stitched or beaded, and eventually take up physical space. I think of material as a form of research: each one carries its own associations with labor, domestic life, preservation, adornment, and repair. I want to follow an image as it changes form and ask what each material can remember, obscure, protect, or reveal. Something is retained. Something shifts. Something new enters. Stories move between generations the same way.

The quilt is where this becomes most vivid for me. In the stories carried down in Black families, cloth held what could not be said aloud — who we are, where we are going. Pattern became a way to say a thing without saying it. I am interested in craft as a system of transmission rather than as decoration: the stitch, the bead, the thread, the vessel, the pot. These are the forms people reached for when nothing else was permitted to them.

The storyteller — the griot — has become central to this inquiry. I am not illustrating individual historical narratives. I am interested in how the act of transmission itself becomes visual form.

Each generation receives the materials — images, rituals, wounds, beauty, humor, labor, faith, knowledge, ways of making — and rearranges them. I make work because I am fascinated by what we carry and by the ways we continually remake ourselves from it. The stories may begin with my own history. I hope they open outward, toward the complicated, ongoing work of being human.

The Artist

Teaching by day.
Making in the midnight hours.

My studio training was in sculpture, working in heavy metals and wood, and that hand never left. The painter leads, but the sculptor insists the surface be something you could read with your fingertips. I build in layers — painterly passages of acrylic, graphite drawing, and archival photographs dissolving into collage, with elements that give each piece a physical body.

I have been making things in the midnight hours for as long as I can remember. Over twenty years of teaching and making both, from Charlottesville, Virginia.

A full life shows up in the work. Welcome to mine.

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