Day Garden

2019, 50”L x 48”W, hand-dyed cotton fabric, stone lithography printed fabric, machine-quilted, hand-embellished.

This piece is about how black people view the natural world through gardening. The people in my family and community take their stewardship of nature seriously. Nature is both close to and inside our homes. My mother had indoor and outdoor gardens. She often opened the windows to almost erase the boundaries between the two. Day Garden and its companion “Night Garden” celebrate this arrangement.

I made the flowers and leaves in Day Garden as tiny individual quilts that are curled into their shapes by pulling the monofilament thread tight.