I use abstraction and color to make sewn paintings and sculptures that explore the relationship between matrilineal connections, gender, place, time, and culture. In my process driven practice, I employ techniques that are typically associated with craft to document the story of our current world, particularly the female narratives that are often neglected from history. By working with geometric compositions, I create a universal visual language to tell these stories, using textiles as a reference to issues of domesticity and women's work. My practice continues the story of geometric abstraction inherent to patchwork found in the Southern and Appalachian regions of the US, where many of my ancestors are from, and my work is steeped in the history of American quilt making and a vast group of unknown female makers. Conceptually my work focuses on the use of readymade, common material and its elevation to high art; the power of color and shape; and is an authentic connection to the past, both personally and universally.

I am drawn to fabric, to its familiarity, its inherent qualities of saturated color and textural luminosity, and its invitation to be touched. Fabric reflects, captures, and interacts with light in a way that no traditional paint can. My sewn paintings are created by cutting fabric with scissors, creating a composition through a process that is similar to assemblage and collage, joining the components together with a sewing machine, and pressing the fabric with an iron. Once the composition is complete, I stretch the fabric around canvas or a wooden panel and staple it into place, allowing the final gestures to be made as a result of the fabric and its seams under tension. By manipulating fabric and pulling it taut, seam lines shift and stretch, revealing their final placement only once the work is finished. 

My use of color is influenced by the work of Josef Albers and his Interaction of Color. As I work with readymade material, commercially available fabric, I explore color relationships and am particularly drawn to bright, saturated palettes. My black and white works are a response to the time I spent in Dakar, Senegal, on the western coast of Africa, during my time as artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal, founded by Kehinde Wiley, in 2019. That experience has had a profound impact on me, as well as my practice, and my current body of work investigates the influence of traditional African patchwork on American patchwork from the South, and how these shared traditions connect us with our ancestors. 

The subject of my work is unequivocally feminist: I specifically choose to work with fabric rather than paint, in reference and reverence to the fact that fiber arts were often the only type of art that women were encouraged to practice for many years throughout history. I have also been focusing on the form of the triangle in many of my recent works. The triangle is the strongest shape, physically speaking, but also symbolically as well. They often represent the female form, and I use them in my work to symbolize the strength of my personal matrilineal line, as well as the universal strength of women.