Every Stitch a Reckoning explores transient memory, homesickness, and family tradition through an awareness that only comes from physical and temporal distance from childhood environments. These oil paintings depict mundane everyday scenes with a sense of melancholy and discomfort, reminiscent of 20th century landscape painters Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. These moods mimic my experiences and anxieties as a woman who grew up in the American South. I made myself small and unassuming, hiding from others' judgments. While my identity as an affluent white woman allows for the idealization of childhood, I use color to draw the line between reckoning and romanticization of Southern domestic life.  

Quilting is used as a call to women’s craft and labor movements throughout history, which included women in several generations of my own family. Juxtaposed with oil painting, quilting becomes fine art, rather than “only” women’s craft work. The quilts also bring comfort back into my work, allowing for innocence and nostalgia to coexist with otherworldly and unsettling vignettes. This illuminates the tension between the paradigm of North Carolina’s values and the underlying complexity of its violent yet rich history.