“Histories on many spectrums—ancestral, artistic, material, personal, and cultural—fuel my practice.
                My studio is a flux of mediums and objects in constant conversation with each other…”
                -Hattie Lee Mendoza (Cherokee), in her artist statement

                Today I got to attend a workshop with Hattie Lee Mendoza. (Here’s some of her art). I got to help carry in boxes of fabric scraps and beads, old bracelets and hole-punched playing cards and thread. Mendoza led us in laying them out, inviting, to cover three tables. She described sketching as a kind of layering things together, seeing how they fit, how the colors play and interplay. How they talk.
                My piece isn’t finished. Right now it’s wrapped up in my backpack, waiting for more stitches. Stitching makes me feel close to my mom, who taught me how to sew. To my aunt and my mom, who sat together laughing and hemming pants for my cousin’s wedding. To a family friend who calmly suggested I could keep sewing after I’d accidentally jabbed my finger. To my grandmother whose embroidery hangs in my mom’s kitchen. To an old roommate who loaned me embroidery thread to fix a hole in a pair of jeans, showing me how I could join the tear into a little scene mountains and rising sun. To another friend whose favorite coat we repaired together. Now the pocket doesn’t swallow their keys. To the friends I sat with at the workshop table today. 
                Mendoza suggested: start with the pieces you most want to include. The found objects and scraps, keys and buttons and shower tiles. See what goes with them. Following Mendoza’s teachings, sitting down became a kind of unfolding: like joining friends to take my unfinished cloth collage out of my backpack and listen as great grandma’s embroidery speaks to the playing cards and a twig from outside and the orange-silver pattern my friend is finding next to me. I’d like to finish this piece. And I’m glad the conversation goes on.