Weaving with bone

Please join me on Thursday, June 11th for the opening of the Miami Fiber Triennial. The Triennial is devoted to contemporary textile, fiber, and expanded material-based practices. In recognition of America250, the program emphasizes the many cultural influences, stories, and artistic lineages that have shaped textile practices across generations. My piece, Breastplate Worn While Keening at the Edge of Empire, was selected for this exhibition.

RSVP for Opening Night
Thursday, June 11, 6:00–9:00 PM
at Miami International Fine Arts (5900 NW 74th Ave, Miami, FL 33166)

Keening, a mourning practice shared among Gaelic-speaking people, was commonly seen in Ireland and Scotland up until the middle of the 20th century when it fell out of favor with the Church. Certain women offered ecstatic wailing cries during burials, which gave community members permission to release their own pent-up emotion and honor their loved ones.

Earlier this year I held a present-day Keening in connection with my installation La Guía. Curator Dainy Tapia invited me to create a performance to close out the exhibition, Deering Contemporary 2026: Here we gather; what we need, we already have.

Titled Keening at the Edge of Empire, the performance was equal parts ritual and theater. It was designed to facilitate catharsis of collective rage, grief, and despair at the current state of our country and the world. I invited a few others to create this performance with me: artists, healers, people who know how to walk between worlds. Emily Peters (an artist + musician who is in residence at Deering Estate this year) crafted a live, sonic landscape as we moved through the performance.

I wove a “breastplate” of python bones to wear during the ritual. Knotted like prayer beads, the strands carry a symbolic charge, referencing the idea that bones can offer power and protection. This vestment / amulet draped my body during the ritual and acts as a record of this outpouring of grief, which also reflects the deep love we hold for the land and our hopes for its future.

My family traces its time on this land back before the American Revolution: I am about as “U.S. Citizen” as it gets, and even I am afraid for my safety and future. We are living through the moment where the Empire tips all the way over into authoritarian chaos. Everything feels volatile, fraught, and dangerous.

We are harvesting fruit from seeds planted across centuries. Violence, greed, and theft are inherent to the U.S. project from the start; but possibility, creativity, and hope have also flourished on this land. Opposites can be true at the same time.

This generational condition, a kind of national meta inheritance, yields unspeakable sorrow in my body. Friends and loved ones feel it too. As I create space to metabolize collective grief through nature-based ritual, I invite people to plant their feet on the earth and acknowledge both the beauty and the violence. To connect with wisdom that lies outside of dominant cultural / political narratives. To embody a different tomorrow.