Bag for life 4: bag for pills (2026)
marbled silk, painted wood
3.5 x 4 x 0.4”
Bag for life 2: Bag for metrocard (2025)
2.75 x 7 x 0.5”
wool, needlepoint canvas, wood
Bag for life 1: Bag for laundry (2025)
12 x 1.5 x 1.5”
wool, rayon, needlepoint canvas
Bag for life 3: bag for bikelights (2025)
sashiko thread, cotton fabric, parachute cord
15 x 2 x 7”
“It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag” - “The Carrier bag theory of fiction”, Ursula K. LeGuin
Life is the occasion: three bags, one to carry quarters for the laundromat, another to hold a metrocard or OMNI card, and the third as an accessory for a night out, to hold bike lights for the ride home while you’re dancing.
The bags signify a peaceful, curious, collaborative, and caring approach to the world: Ursula K. Le Guin posits that the carrier bag, not the weapon, should be seen as the archetypal and original tool created by humans. Inspired by the young campers whom I taught every week and their creative instinct to make tiny bags for almost no purpose, I imagined what a single-purpose (but not single-use) bag would look like. Teaching them about Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach - making the ordinary extraordinary - made me wonder how to turn the most mundane of errands, like taking the subway or washing clothes, into an utterly fabulous outing.
Bags for life 1, 2 and 3 exhibited at ‘Threading the Needle’ exhibition of youth educators at Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, 2025.