I am an artist whose work bridges contemporary and traditional craft. My family has practiced the art of quilting for the past 100 years. My paternal grandmother Eugenia Kincaid, with whom I collaborate on my work at a spiritual level, is my most immediate influence. In quilted textile paintings that are at once tactile and ancestral, I build layered narratives that reflect on the construction of perception and collective experience.

My performance project, “The Summoning,” presented in collaboration with Saint Louis commercial art space projects+gallery, was a participatory ritual. My assistant “spirits” and I guided the performance, which is built upon the implications of this craft tradition while responding to the urban environment and social issues that the city is currently experiencing. The ritual took place within the domed walls of German architecture collective raumlaborberlin’s “Spacebuster,” a diaphanous, inflatable, and movable piece of architecture consisting of a van retrofitted with a large inflatable that extended from the hatch and held up to 80 people, becoming a social space for temporary collective use. Guests were instructed to arrive wearing two layers of clothing, with an outer layer that may be cut into pieces. Upon arrival, participants were met by the assistants: two stoic guards wearing masks and staffs standing watch at the Spacebuster’s entry; two women draped in my quilt pieces, seated in thrones and poised to serve as silent sovereigns over the proceedings; and two collaborators who assisted me in the removal of my own clothing.

Scissors, needle, and thread were then provided for each guest as I led them through the delicate process of cutting off their neighbor’s outer layer of clothing, while a DJ provided ambient sound under the cast of dim floodlights at dusk. Participants exchanged these fabric swatches and sewed them together into quilted squares composed of parts of their own clothes and parts of their neighbor’s. As friends, families and strangers interacted physically and spiritually, the performance achieved the purpose of stitching together a community within the safe haven of the breathing walls. As participants left, the patched squares were collected—which I later used to build a large quilted wall hanging that functions as a tangible record of the transitory communion, as well as an artwork in its own right.