The materials that create form in an artwork presents an added layer of meaning. I was raised primarily by my grandmother who was born in 1908, and was an extraordinary seamstress.  Textiles have been in my hands for as long as I can remember and they are potent signifiers:  labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history.  My engagement with textiles is between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting and sculpture, landscape and portrait, history and the present. In particular, I explore the contradictions of whiteness in textiles as something pure, stained, fragmented, constructed, degraded, broken and enduring.