Descriptions of Work Samples
 
A
Textile Arts as Community Panelists

October 2025

I was fortunate to serve on this panel with four women that I admire and have worked with in some capacity. In February 2020, I raised funds to bring LaShawnda Crowe Storm to Birmingham to present a selection from The Lynch Quilts Project. Ms. Storm provided workshops, an artist talk, and worked with students at the high school and college level during her residency. Her workshop on healing racial trauma through sewing and art was the foundation for that year's March Quilts theme (for more information on The March Quilts, see below). Birmingham native Erin Leann Mitchell is a textile artist currently based in Harlem. I procured funding in 2020 for Ms. Mitchell to create a modern-day barn quilt for Bib & Tucker Sew-Op and in 2026, she will create commissioned work for the 10th anniversary of The March Quilts 2: Gender Pay Equity. Wilhelmina Thomas has been a supporter of Bib & Tucker Sew-Op and The March Quilts for a decade. She has also been commissioned for the Gender Pay Equity project in 2026. Theresa Johnson runs her own quilting group in Birmingham and is a master quilter. We will partner with her organization in 2026 for a "storytellers in quilting" project.

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B

Post-panel community gathering with CREATE Birmingham

October 2025

Viola Ratcliffe (2nd from right) is director of Community Engagement for CREATE in Birmingham. I hired her to be program manager for Bib & Tucker Sew-Op in 2018 and handed directorship of the Sew-Op over to her in 2022. She was hired by CREATE at the end of 2022 and has been instrumental in lifting up textile arts within the creative community in Birmingham. Our network is strong and continues to grow. Ms. Ratcliffe was also instrumental in bringing LaShawnda Crowe Storm to Birmingham in 2020 and again in 2025 as part of Bound Together (previous image).

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C

Artist Residency at BigCi Bilpin, New South Wales, Australia - Open Day

September 2025

After a month of solo work and reflection, I - along with three other artists - gave a presentation on the work we did in residence at BigCi. Each of us addressed environmental issues in our presentations. It is my desire to repurpose materials in my textile work. I aim for zero-waste creation, utilizing scraps from previous projects rather than investing in new materials. I also incorporate weather in my work: looking at how sun, wind, rain, and the mixing of these elements affects textiles over time. My experimental pieces are often embellished or augmented prior to being placed in nature for an extended period of time. I carried out these experiements during my time in the Blue Mountains.  

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D

Artist Residency at BigCi Bilpin, New South Wales, Australia - Open Day Presentation

September 2025

View of my in-progress work as displayed for my BigCi Open Day Presentation

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E

Artist Residency at BigCi Bilpin, New South Wales, Australia - Open Day Presentation (Detail)

September 2025, 44" x 48"

This work-in-progress is intuitively quilted and embellished with felt leaves meant to mimic the Eucalyptus. I am currently finishing this piece so that it can be the focal point of my upcoming solo exhibition, Scribbly Gums in the Wollemi: What the Blue Mountains Said to Me.

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F

March Quilts in Africatown

July 2025

As director of The March Quilts, I apply for funding as well as facilitate our workshops and cultural events. Thanks to funding procured from Alabama Folklife Association, Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood, we were able to exhibit four quilts from the collection during Africatown's Culture Fest this summer. The quilts were viewed by 100s of attendees and over 30 Africatown residents sewed with us over the course of the festival. Our partners in Africatown requested support to create a "sister quilt" to the one being created in celebration of ten years of The March Quilts. This organization started as a community arts project through the other nonprofit I co-founded, Bib & Tucker Sew-Op.

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G

Community Sewing in Midlife Catharsis

November 2024

I am a self-taught knitter, sewist, embroiderer, and fiber artist. I have always fortified my skillset amongst generations of women and I enjoy building community around these art forms. When I'm able, I will host community sewing sessions amidst my exhibitions because my work grows and improves thanks to the communities of women that support me.

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H

Untitled, from the Organic Geometries series

2024, 48" x 48"

At some point in my textile journey, I became disenchanted with the uniformity and rigidity of the machine-sewn quilt block. But I am drawn to geometric shapes and especially enjoy learning new methods for connecting rectangles and 90-degree triangles. In order to continue playing with these blocks, I found that overlaying organic embroidered webs prior to hand-quilting the pieces softened the overall effect. I like blending the two dualities so as to create a third way that is neither soft nor hard.

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I

Presentation wall in Midlife Catharsis

2024, Various sizes

At the end of 2023, I stepped away from full-time nonprofit management and focused on my artistic practice. I was able to install two solo exhibitions at the beginning and end of 2024. In both shows, I created "studio walls" that were covered with works-in-progress. While they were meant to spark conversation with my audience, referencing critique-style discourse from my time as an art student, they were also meant to challenge me to take steps towards completion. Many of the pieces that were tacked to the studio wall in January 2024 became finished pieces in time for Midlife Catharsis.

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J & K

Hannie Howard

2024, 20" x 20"

I have always enjoyed painting and was comfortable with acrylics and watercolors decades prior to picking up needle and thread. When I felt that I had mastered sewing and embroidered, I learned to combine my skills into one form: digitally printing my paintings onto fabric that I could then embellish with embroidery and appliqué. This is a portrait of my maternal grandmother, Hannie, who died of breast cancer and kidney disease when I was 2 years old. Hannie was an avid sewist, often making things and donating them in her community. Prior to my first solo exhibit of 2024, "I'd Really Rather Sew Than Eat, Or A Lot of Other Things", I found a letter where Hannie thanked her aunt for teaching her to sew. I framed the letter and included it in the show. The title came from the letter.

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L, M & N

The Artist as Frida

2024, 16" x 20"

I have always felt a connection to artist Frida Kahlo, but never did the affinity feel more real to me than when I suffered a miscarriage at the age of 40. At age 45, I believe that I am channeling my "pro"-creative energies into art, community, and teaching. This piece and the previous piece are examples of a new direction for me where I combine painting and fiber arts, aiming to subvert the designation of embroidery and handwork as "craft" and not "art".

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O

Ms. Annie Bryant and Lillis Taylor inside Midlife Catharsis

2024

Ms. Annie and I co-founded Bib & Tucker Sew-Op in 2014 after four years of using the modality of sewing to develop grassroots community service. We began our multi-racial and multi-generational partnership in a small library in the Birmingham neighborhood of Inglenook and a decade later, Ms. Annie witnessed my solo exhibition, Midlife Catharsis, in a gallery situated blocks from that original library. 

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​P & Q

Gee's Bend Quilter, Mary Ann Pettway and Lillis Taylor in UAB's ArtLab

March 2024

In the summer of 2007, I was home visiting family before returning to Seattle to start a master degree program in China Studies. After graduating with a degree in Industrial Design and working for a book and toy development company that manufactured everything in China, I had decided to shift my focus to US-China labor relations.

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R

Cast Your Net, It Shall Bring Tales

2023, 67" x 87"

The acts of piecing, embellishing, and hand-quilting are for me practical tasks that put my physical body in motion, clearing space for metaphysical discovery. The fisherman casts his nets so as to set in motion the task of collecting fish, and in the space between casting and hauling there is quiet and time for looking to the stars; dreaming and pondering. To build this quilt, I sorted and organized thirteen years worth of scraps (86 unique textiles); assembled intuitively and methodically. Only when the top was sewn and partially filled with unplanned, embroidered forms did a narrative emerge, helped along by conversations with my husband, my truest partner in metaphysical discovery. The epic tale of Odysseus and Penelope was a touchstone during our long courtship, and thus there is a personal mythology embroidered here, but I urge the viewer: cast your net, it shall bring tales.
 
S

Babukeshi Tapestry

2021, 35” x 55”

Babukeshi is a project born from my work with UAB Arts in Medicine. From 2014 to 2020, I taught embroidery to patients, family caregivers, and staff across UAB hospital. I witnessed the healing power of the arts first-hand. After a trip to Oaxaca in 2016, I started researching and conceiving a project that would honor ancestors, both real and chosen. Babukeshi is a word I coined to mean “ancestor doll”. The Babukeshi wall hanging is a collage of my illustrations after visiting Oaxaca and Tanzania. After reading a letter that my grandmother wrote to her aunt, I turned to my own ancestors for inspiration. The Hannie installation is the result of on-going research into what it means to commune with one’s ancestors. I never knew Anne Elizabeth Kling Howard (maternal grandmother who I call Hannie) but she was an avid sewist and I feel like my own obsession with fiber arts is a thread that binds us. My mother helped with parts of the Hannie Babukeshi, and that has been an important part of this work for me.

 
T

Kaleidoscope Series

Various dates (2021-2023) & sizes

When I was a kid, a kaleidoscope could entrance me for hours. The combination of overwrought colors and sacred geometry, fluidly transitioning from one satisfying array to infinitely more pleasing symmetries was just what my brain needed to release its store of dopamine. And if honest-to-god plastic "gems" were part of the random collection of tidbits at the kaleidoscope's base, all the better. I've learned recently from the inestimable Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints on YouTube), that I’m in the “Opulence” camp; hence my approach to quilting. This whole-cloth, hand-quilted piece is a digital print on cotton sateen. I took a watercolor sketch and created kaleidoscopic snapshots with an app on my phone, next manipulating the colors in Photoshop. The digital stuff is for the fast part of my brain and the hand-quilting thankfully slows my brain down again. And best of all, the result takes me back to dreamily twisting a kaleidoscope.
 
U
Chris' Quilt
2021, approx 4.5' x 5'

This piece was improvisationally pieced and hand-quilted. 
 
V
The March Quilts Project - Year 6 - Lynch Quilts Project (Response)

2020, 47" x 77"

In early 2020, prior to the world shutting down, LaShawnda Crowe Storm came to Birmingham as part of a residency and exhibition of four pieces from her project, The Lynch Quilts. Birmingham residents were offered a chance to participate in two workshops with Ms. Storm. During these sessions, participants discussed the arc of racial violence in America and sat together sewing with Ms. Storm. Then a global pandemic isolated us all from our communities and the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and others, forced a reckoning that is still unfinished. In the wake of all of this upheaval, The March Quilts project became a response to Ms. Crowe's work, open only to participants of her workshops in Birmingham. 12 individuals created blocks to illustrate their experience with The Lynch Quilts project and I arranged and pieced the blocks and hand-quilted and bound the resulting piece. I also created a block for the project (third row, third from left).
 
W

The March Quilts Project - Year 1 - Members' Quilt

2015, 53" x 65.6"

The March Quilts is an annual project that sheds light on themes of civil and human rights through sewing sessions where participants can express themselves through needle and thread. During the first year of the project, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, acknowledging how far we've come as a society - and how far yet we have to go. 461 blocks were collected at sewing sessions held in churches, hospitals, schools, community centers, libraries and more. Three community quilts were made by members of Bib & Tucker Sew-Op, a nonprofit I co-founded in 2014. Bib & Tucker members wanted to create their own quilt as a companion to the community quilts. 16 individuals created blocks to illustrate their feelings about the 50th anniversary and I arranged and pieced the blocks and hand-quilted and bound the resulting piece. I incorporated small squares of the background fabric used in the community quilts, meant to evoke the colors of the environment the marchers were steeped in for five days between Selma and Montgomery. In this case, the smaller blocks are meant to evoke stained glass in this quilt because churches were the foundation of the movement. I also created a block for the project (top row, third from left).

 
X & Y
Mother and Child

2015, 4 ft x 3 ft

Nurse and Patient

2015, 4 ft x 3 ft

As an artist in residence for UAB Arts in Medicine, I designed, facilitated, and sewed these wallhangings which continue to greet visitors of UAB’s Women and Infant Center lobby. I processed donated scrubs into circles that were then sewn into fabric hexagons by patients, family caregivers, and medical staff. I then hand-sewed the hexagons together and added the black piping to create the imagery of a mother with her child and a nurse with her patient.
 
Z & AA

re:TOUCHED Tapestries

Work-in-progress, various sizes

re:TOUCHED is about working to replace raw materials with items saved from the landfill in my artistic practice. I hope to find new ways of viewing cast offs that will encourage viewers to consider our throw away society. My exploration is nascent; shown here are scraps from other projects that have been pieced, dyed, and embellished. I have just begun to incorporate scraps of trash (manipulated aluminum cans)