2024.
collage on 100% cotton.
water-based pigment inks and dyes, thread, blessing notes, family cloth, hand-dyed cotton.

Collection of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture

Inspired by Elizabeth Talford Scott's collaborative practice with her daughter, I conducted a heartfelt phone interview with my mother, followed by a nostalgic visit to my childhood home in Washington, DC. Of Labor & Love documents the sacred objects and ancestral threads that bind us across time.

At its heart, this piece features an early 1990s photograph of me alongside my great-grandmother, Grace—whom I am named after—with her 1920s sewing machine collaged below us. Three generations converge: her hands, her machine, my name, my practice. The sewing machine becomes both ancestor and witness, a tool that carried her labor, creativity, and survival into my own hands.

This artwork serves as a meditation on gratitude, spanning generations and honoring the enduring legacies we leave behind—often through the quiet, relentless work of making. It speaks to the hard labor of preserving ourselves, our careers, and our craft in a world not designed to hold us. It captures our everyday contributions to our own healing and legacy: the stitching, the mending, the building of beauty from what we've been given and what we've transformed.

This work emphasizes the importance of cherishing the past, valuing the present, and nurturing a vision of hope for the future—understanding that legacy is not passive inheritance, but active care passed hand to hand, mother to daughter, generation to generation.

All imagery in this work is drawn from family archives and photographs of relevant objects taken by the artist.

Founded in 2023, Soft Gather™ is an ongoing series of healing installations that utilize fiber and the vibrant language of color therapy to create intentional spaces where Black women, gender-expansive people, and communities are invited to gather, reflect, rest, and nurture relationships. Soft Gather evokes a cohesive sense of mind, body, and spirit through art—offering environments that give permission to slow down, to feel without performing, to be held without explanation.

Each Soft Gather installation is site-responsive and community-specific, adapting to meet the needs of the people it serves. Rooted in my social work training and community arts background, these spaces function as both artwork and refuge: large-scale fiber environments designed to hold bodies, facilitate connection, and honor the labor of rest in a world that demands constant productivity.

Soft Gather for BLOOM Collective served as the pilot installation, created in partnership with an organization providing holistic care along the preconception, pregnancy, and postpartum journey. Installed during Black Maternal Health Week 2024, this iteration was inspired by being held, the circular process of life, connection to the land, the earth's nourishment, and honoring of grand midwives. The space offered the BLOOM community a place to gather and build relationships through conversation, rest, play, and release—a restful, beautiful experience that aligned with how they want their community to feel: light and at peace.

Soft Gather, Quiet Flame emerged through my 2025 GIST Yarn residency and Grit Fund grant, creating intimate fiber art gatherings specifically for introverted Black women exploring quiet power. This iteration recognizes that not all care looks the same; some need grand communal spaces, others need smaller, more protected containers where silence is honored and solitude is collective.

Setting the Table for Ourselves continues the Soft Gather methodology, inviting participants to claim space, prepare the conditions for their own nourishment, and practice the radical act of tending to themselves and each other. Through rituals of gathering—setting intentions, sharing stories, creating together—the installation asks: What does it mean to prepare a table for our own care rather than waiting to be served?

Through Soft Gather, I'm building a methodology for care-centered art-making that asks: How do we create spaces that center healing and transformation? What does art make possible when beauty, functionality, and care work together? How can fiber—soft, flexible, resilient—model the qualities we need to navigate collective grief and joy?

Soft Gather is my life's work: an evolving practice of creating beauty as hospitality, fiber as care infrastructure, and art as the material practice of holding each other through.

2022, yarn, spinning fiber, & hand-dyed fabric.

Honoring my family through my art creates space for me to give them more of my time, to archive their stories, and to ease my anxieties around future loss. It gives us joy, strengthens our bonds, allows the rest of our family to learn more about each other, and gives me peace in knowing they will live on forever through my work—not as absence, but as presence woven into fiber.

My dad took me to my very first concert, the TLC Fanmail Tour. When I think of home, I imagine music blasting from the basement—sound as the first language of our house. My dad's lifelong relationship with and love for music seamlessly integrated into our lives as an everyday part of our upbringing, shaping how we moved through the world.

Through the musical presence he created in our home, his vast knowledge of genres, and his frequent storytelling of his own experiences, my appreciation for music became interwoven with his own. These weavings celebrate conversations and moments shared with my dad, as well as music that evokes memory for us both—Stevie Wonder's melodies threading through our separate and shared experiences.

In creating this work, I returned home, bonded with my dad over his love for music, and dug through his favorite vinyl records together. The weavings were created intuitively: colors directly inspired by album covers, rhythm drawn from the music itself. Each piece becomes a visual record of sound, a way of holding time with my father—archiving not just what he loves, but how we love each other through listening.

2022, yarn, spinning fiber, & hand-dyed fabric. 30 in x 223 in

blue: ancestral healing is inspired by my mother, my grandmother, and their devotion to blue—a color that flows throughout our home like a sacred current, often manifesting as glass. Viewers often describe standing within this installation as feeling like a hug—an embrace of protection, peace, and ancestral presence.

My mother, a lover of literature, genealogy, and African American history, carries blue as both inheritance and intention. When asked about her draw to this color, she shared her fascination with haint blue painted on shutters and ceilings—protective thresholds against malevolent spirits—and the beauty of bottle trees standing guard in Southern yards. She spoke of blue's African meanings: peace, togetherness, and spiritual protection. "Why do I love blue?" she reflected. "I am spiritually drawn to it."

This installation honors that pull—the way blue moves through generations, carrying ancestral knowledge in its depths. It creates a space where visitors are held, where the color itself becomes an act of care. It is a meditation on the colors we inherit, the rituals we preserve, and the healing we pass down through material and memory—an enveloping tenderness woven from fiber, glass, and generations of love.