FEATURED PROJECT
Banned
FIBER ART · COMMUNITY · RESISTANCE
Banned is a two-piece fiber art project built from portraits, language, and the complicated ways words can be used to define people. Across fifty individual portraits, hand-embroidered terms become part of the image, confronting the labels, assumptions, and restrictions that shape how people are seen.
2026
Hand embroidery · Machine quilting
Cotton · Embroidery floss · Photo transfers
Two works · 45 × 45 inches each
THE PROJECT
What happens when a word becomes a boundary?
Banned began with language: the words people are told not to use, the identities they are encouraged to soften, and the parts of themselves that can become controversial simply because someone else decides they are.
The project is made up of fifty portrait images divided across two quilts. Some photographs feature one person, while others include two people. Each image is paired with a hand-embroidered word or phrase connected to something that has been restricted, discouraged, challenged, stigmatized, or treated as unacceptable.
Bringing those words directly onto portraits changes the way they are read. They stop being abstract ideas and become attached to real faces, real lives, and real people.
I wanted the work to hold both the individuality of each image and the larger pattern that emerges when all fifty are placed together. Banned asks what happens when language, identity, expression, or lived experience is treated as something that should be hidden, controlled, softened, or removed.
A word can look very different once there is a person standing behind it.
PROCESS + MATERIALS
Built one image, one word, and one stitch at a time.
Each image began digitally, where I prepared the photograph before printing it onto transfer paper. The image was then transferred onto cotton, creating the base for the embroidered text.
Once the photograph was on fabric, I hand embroidered the selected word or phrase directly onto the image. Choosing to stitch each word by hand was important to me because it forced me to spend time with the language rather than treating it as another design element. Repeating the words slowly, one stitch at a time, gave me another way to process what each one carried and allowed the project to resonate with me on a more personal level.
The individual images were then sewn together to build the larger quilt composition. Once all of the portrait blocks were assembled, I completed the final quilting process to bring each piece together as a finished work.
Moving through the project one image at a time made the process intentionally repetitive and slow. Each photograph was prepared, transferred, embroidered, trimmed, pieced, and quilted before becoming part of the larger whole.
LANGUAGE + COMMUNITY
The words are not separate from the people they affect.
The language in Banned is intentionally direct. Each word or phrase points to something that has been restricted, discouraged, challenged, stigmatized, or treated as unacceptable.
Using portraits was important because I did not want the language to exist on its own. Once a word is placed onto the image of a real person, it becomes harder to treat it as an abstract argument. The work asks the viewer to consider who is actually affected when certain identities, experiences, ideas, or forms of expression are pushed aside.
The project also became a community effort through the people who agreed to become part of the work. Their presence gives Banned its scale and its humanity. Each image remains individual, but together they create something collective.
I am interested in that tension between the personal and the larger social pattern. One word may belong to one image, but when all fifty are seen together, the repetition begins to reveal how many different ways people can be told that some part of who they are is too much, inappropriate, controversial, or better left unseen.
The project is about language, but it only works because there are people behind the words.
EXHIBITIONS
Where the work has been shown.
Banned 1 and Banned 2 were included in Revolutionary Stitches, an exhibition centered on fiber art as a way for women to express fears, hopes, reactions, and possible solutions. The exhibition drew on the long history of women using stitching as a form of voice and invited local fiber artists to respond through their own work.
2026
Revolutionary Stitches
Freight House · Paducah, KY
Banned 1 + Banned 2
2026
Revolutionary Stitches
The 1857 Hotel · Paducah, KY
Banned 1 + Banned 2
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