I work out of a studio in my periodically flooded New Orleans home. The 100 sq foot room is a labyrinth of stacked boxes, organized with fabric and supplies. Old cabinets line the walls filled with thread by color; ribbons, velvet, all in its place. Each work station is in front of a window with a view of the live oak tree in the backyard. The yard is alive with a Southeast Louisiana ecosystem. When I sit outside in the summer, the lizards hang out with me and eat the mosquitoes that land on my legs.  

In the front yard, I grow flowers and press the blooms, something I learned from my grandmother, then cyanotype them onto fabric. There are also flowers I use for dyeing textiles. Their colors soft, muted, and familiar. I have tended to my garden for 8 years; watched it change each season, and helped it to thrive. It teaches me patience and the joy of being surprised.

I have always felt the pull toward responsible actions to help the environment, but there’s something about defending a home from water that has every right to go where it wants to go that can radicalize a person. My tool is often my Janome sewing machine with a free motion quilting foot attached, but I don’t like to spend too long without putting my hands to work through hand sewing, carving a linoleum block, or cutting fabric. After decades spent professionally interacting with clothing and fabric andthinking about the current never-ending stream of discarded textiles, I became committed to using primarily salvaged fabric in my work.

The proverbial 80s child product of divorce, I leaned heavily into digesting comedy as a coping mechanism. Funny people make a part of your brain light up that is often dark when the world feels dark. Being able to create something great in an improvisational style is electric and the joy of making people laugh can be magic. What I create isn’t often humorous, but honoring how often laughter and surprise are connected, I adopt surpriseand translate it into surrealism.