My studio is where I find my inspiration: paint on paper, threads on a loom. The feeling there seems to dictate my day, my mood wandering with the weather.

If the sun is pouring in, warming up the room, I tend to get energized, working across mediums—weaving at the loom or painting on the floor—basking in the space as the light bounces off the exposed beams in the ceiling, the bright white walls, and the worn patchwork wooden floors.

If it’s a cold, dark morning, I tend to be more inward. I make a warm herbal tea and work on something more technical, like warping a loom or prepping paper or gessoing a canvas for a new work. I like to think of the darkness as a time to prepare for the light again. I think of an interview with the poet Ruth Stone, where she described her inspiration as a thunderous train of air that runs through her. When the inspiration comes, I need to be ready for it.

My space energizes me, jolts me out of my cycling inner dialogue and into the action of creation. I allow myself to improvise. If something feels interesting—like a cross-stitch embroidery I made of two birds held together by a heart, where the ivory stitches turned light blue from the darkly dyed indigo ground cloth I’d embedded them into—I tack it to the wall, stand back, and squint. As I create work, I drape my art across my dress form or lay it on the floor. My studio is filled with these seemingly disparate handmade things that live next to each other, and my mission is to find connections between them. Art happens in those in-between spaces. When that occurs, it feels like magic. And if I’m patient, my work becomes timeless.

Sometimes I can live with something in my space for a whole year before it finds its way into my art—often even longer. I think this patience is really my secret ingredient when it comes to making art. I need to allow time and space for these bits to find their own way, to mystically somehow absorb more of me and my life experience, before taking their creative places. I think good art needs that. My work gains meaning after I patch together all these pieces that represent how I felt on particular days. It’s a memorial to my life as it is lived in moments.

Or if I feel the cloth is in need of a more dynamic color composition, I spontaneously drip dye over the weaving after it’s been unfurled from the loom, saturating it with wet pools of color.

Weaving is a process tied to a grid. The patterns embedded in that grid often remind us of something very old and nostalgic. Something from a simpler time before mass production, made by hands rather than machines, like that well-loved blanket found in a grandmother’s attic. The grid gives a structure and form to the light and to the color that comes with it. My art can then carry that energy to other spaces across the world.