Preparing for Curious Maximalist

As I prepare for my upcoming solo exhibition, Curious Maximalist at Little Bites Gallery in Santa Fe, I keep returning to the idea of balance. My studio practice moves between different ways of making, each with its own visual language, materials, and questions. This exhibition brings some of these things together, offering a glimpse into the conversations that happen behind the scenes in my studio.

My studio practice moves between very different ways of making. Some work begins with the land, local materials, and questions about labor, ecology, and place. Other work is more personal, colorful, symbolic, and inward-looking. Then there are the small assemblages, which allow me to be playful, intuitive, and responsive to the objects I have gathered over many years.

Rather than trying to make all of these parts of my practice look the same, Curious Maximalist gives me space to let them speak to one another.

Balancing Form, Color, and Concept

I think carefully about both what a work means and how it appears in space. Concept matters deeply to me, but so do form, color, texture, scale, and visual presence. Sometimes a piece asks to be quiet and restrained. Sometimes it needs saturated color, ornament, humor, or excess.

In my ongoing project Gathered & Felt, which is inspired by the land and sheep ranching traditions of Northern New Mexico, I am working primarily with neutral tones, local wool, plant fibers, and found ranching materials (lots of rusted metal and old hay bale ropes). The palette reflects the landscape and the materials themselves. That work is large in scale and grounded in questions about labor, ecological memory, repair, and the relationships between people, animals, and place.

The works in my Nigredo series come from a more personal place. These sculptural felt wall pieces use stronger colors and more intimate symbolism. The series is named for the alchemical stage associated with dissolution, darkness, and transformation. For me, these works hold inner landscapes shaped by memory, uncertainty, grief, change, and shadow work.

The assemblages in Curious Maximalist create another kind of balance. They are smaller, more playful, and densely layered with color, texture, and collected materials. They bring together felt, vintage textiles, inherited objects, childhood artifacts, thrift-store finds, estate-sale discoveries, and small curiosities gathered from roadsides and other unexpected places.

These works may be intimate in scale, but they are not minor. They allow me to work quickly and intuitively while still paying close attention to composition, craftsmanship, and meaning. They also offer a more accessible way for people to collect original work from the exhibition.

Collecting as Part of the Art Process

Collecting has always been part of how I understand the world.

I am drawn to objects that show evidence of previous lives: a worn piece of fabric, a tiny charm, a fragment of trim, a faded plastic toy, a seed pod or something found on the side of the road. I rarely see these things as finished objects. I see them as materials with open possibilities.

Sometimes I clean, stitch, wrap, paint, cut, felt around, or otherwise alter what I collect. At other times, the most important decision is to leave an object nearly unchanged and place it beside something unexpected. The meaning comes through the relationship between materials.

This process is less about preserving objects exactly as they were and more about asking what else they might become.

Growing up in South Louisiana, I was surrounded by the visual traditions of Catholicism and Mardi Gras. Altars, costumes, handmade adornments, sacred objects, beads, metallic fabrics, floral decorations, and treasured keepsakes were all woven into everyday life. Those influences continue to appear in my work, often in the form of contemporary reliquaries, wearable talismans, shrine-like arrangements, and curiosity collections.

Wool, Water, and Transformation

Wool remains central to the exhibition because it is such a transformative material.

Through wet and needle felting, loose fibers become dense, durable forms. The process is physical and repetitive. It involves layering, rubbing, rolling, shaping, waiting, and responding to what the material is doing.

I use harvested rainwater for much of my felting process. When the work is finished, I reuse the leftover water in my garden. This is a practical choice, but it is also connected to how I think about making. I want the process to remain part of a larger cycle of care rather than feeling separate from the landscape around my studio.

View this post on Instagram

I do not try to control every stage of the process. Wool shrinks, shifts, folds, and thickens in ways that cannot always be fully predicted. Found materials bring their own limitations and histories. I work collaboratively with those qualities, allowing the final form to emerge through a conversation between intention and response.

An Opening Reception with Interactive Elements

I am especially excited about the opening reception because I do not want visitors to feel that they are only there to look at finished objects.

The opening will include invitations to make, collect, play, and become part of the exhibition experience. I am thinking of the atmosphere as a little like an imaginative 1980s school bazaar, with art-making stations, mystery grab bags, tiny art, and vintage ephemera.

Visitors will be able to play the art and vintage ephemera grab bag game, create something of their own, and, weather permitting, join together under a giant P.E. parachute.

The parachute is intentionally playful and communal. It asks people to move together, pay attention to one another, and participate in a temporary shared form. In a way, it reflects many of the same ideas that appear in the artwork: interconnectedness, transformation, memory, cooperation, and the pleasure of handling materials.

I want the opening to feel generous, curious, and welcoming to people of all ages. It is not only a reception for viewing art. It is an invitation to enter the world of the exhibition through movement, making, collecting, and play.

About the Exhibition

Curious Maximalist brings together new works from my Nigredo series of sculptural felt wall pieces alongside small-scale assemblages made from felt, vintage textiles, and collected curiosities.

Across both bodies of work, I am thinking about how people, materials, memories, and objects change over time. I am interested in what happens when ordinary or overlooked things are given sustained attention, and how slow making can transform them into objects of reflection, humor, tenderness, and care.

Curious Maximalist opens Friday, August 21, 2026, from 6:00–8:00 pm at Little Bites Gallery, 805 A Early Street in Santa Fe. The exhibition remains on view through September 20, with gallery hours Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4:00 pm.

Admission is free, and guests of all ages are welcome.