The complex, layered realities of my communal ancestry's history and visual archives set forth the foundations of creative purpose in my studio practice and research. A significant part of my work is rooted in quilts made during the period of early European colonization of North America through post-antebellum, stitched on and, eventually, off cotton plantations by enslaved and free African Americans well into the mid-20th century and continuing to a communal practice today. These quilts, their makers' lives, and the material that gives them life, cotton, serve as the historical sources and points of departure I use to examine, explore, and comprehend this dreadful time in America's history while simultaneously searching and locating connected global and cultural economics, commodities, and realities people and place and the entanglements therein that have rippled into the present.

Quilts and their makers fascinate me for their uniqueness in origin, evolution, aesthetics, visual endurance, and range of creative techniques and processes. I return to them, as visual anchors for my practice, they historically locate me and inform my selection of and approach to ceramic material. In this expanded field of ceramics in which I also work with ancillary materials that expand on established techniques while also forging new technical processes.

Cotton, from which the quilts are made, is the material  my ancestors, both enslaved and free, cultivated, picked and sewn. Cotton, the commodity at the center of my lineage, led me to the global history, trade, and impact of its production in textiles and trade.  Following cotton off the plantations of the American South and the financial markets of the North, I encounter various other cultures, economies, and time periods connected to ‘king cotton’ unearthing interconnected journeys, timelines, sometimes appearing non-linear from the past to the present.

Quilts from these periods reveal and preserve the historical blending of aesthetics and the emergence of a distinct material culture that allows me to move between and mediate the debatable and pliable line of craft and art. The diverse and interconnected histories I encounter from following cotton through time permeates and informs my practice and how I title my work. The historical and anthropological function of ceramic history through cultures and the spectrum of technical processes accumulated over time exposed me to a deep treasure of possibilities to search and respond to the peripheral, hidden and lost parts of history.  

As I think more deeply about the city of my birth, Hartford, CT, I have reached deeper into another root of research tangled in the garden of my mind, seemingly unconnected: Sojourner Truth. The story of Truth, a woman enslaved in New England,expanded my research when I found out her first language was Dutch and realized  how much Dutch culture and history surrounded me growing up in Connecticut. Stories like Truth’s allowed me to follow cotton around the world, to follow a mass of entangled roots into a symbiotic cross-pollination of facts. This research brought my work into a deeper potency expanding from tiles that create ceramic quilts to the spoons that serve as metaphors for domestic labor and the complexity of food and culture to the cast porcelain bleach bottles I made while in residence at Kohler. Incorporating drawing into these bottles and other works I use words in Dutch, French, Portuguese and English to further reveal the synthesis I see in the quilts and history I research. These words, along with selected longitude and latitude coordinates, reflect and are related to marine navigation and the traded commodities that moved across the oceans and seas of the world. 

Adaptation, resourcefulness, survival, and triumph are what I appreciate when I consider the fullness of these quilts, their makers, and the history from which they emerge and have moved through time. My work centers the realities of those who sewed and stitched, to encompass all those who stitched and sewed a resolute history and legacy gifted freedom, personhood, and rich visual language to our world.