Home to Me
May 2026 | First Friday exhibit, Sage Bird Ciderworks, Harrisonburg VA
Quilts can represent so many things: comfort, warmth, ancestry, struggle, love – a patchwork of many emotions, memories, and experiences. I have always loved the diversity and versatility of quilts, how they reflect people and communities. From craftspeople in India to sewing circles in Europe to Gee’s Bend, a community of quilters in rural Alabama known for their improvisational techniques, every quilt tells a story, intentionally or not.
Design traditions of quilts, especially from Mennonite styles, have subliminally influenced my work for a long time, but in the last few months I became interested in explicitly using quilt patterns as a backdrop for experimenting with different mediums in botanical subjects. In the careful steadiness needed for painting straight lines and the repetitive motions of filling in stitches with embroidery thread, I have found small moments of tranquility during the busyness of my everyday life. Life is a beautiful – though sometimes hard – patchwork of these contradicting moments, holding both the calm and the chaos together.
