Indigenous Fashion Arts:
We Are The Culture We Wear

Highlights From Arrowmont

I participated in the inspirational career-changing Spring Pentaculum residency at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts on May 11-16, 2026. It’s an invitational artist retreat in the Great Smoky Mountains designed to provide artists with uninterrupted time, space, and creative community to deepen their studio practice. It happened on the land of one of my most spiritual places, the mountains of Western North Carolina. I’m an ocean girl living in a swamp. Having my feet on some of the oldest mountains on the planet, high above sea level, makes me giddy and lightheaded, filling me with excitement.

Currently, I’m facilitating my self-healing through the grief process by sewing myself happy with fabrics and fashion. Drawing on my cultural identity and memories of people and places I love, I’m upcycling and embellishing reclaimed clothing and textiles. Drawing from my stash of hand-dyed indigo fabrics, inherited ribbons and trims, vintage buttons, beads, hand stitching, embroidery, and family photographs printed on fabric, I aim to transform worn garments into contemporary fiber artworks that honor Indigenous Geechee Gullah and Southern storytelling traditions.

This work reflects my belief that clothing can serve as an archive carrying memory, ancestry, grief, celebration, and survival within its fibers. I’m creating like the women in my family who taught me through slow textile processes rooted in repair and preservation. What started at Arrowmont combines fashion, quilting, adornment, and memoir while reimagining clothing as culturally significant objects of remembrance and identity.

This body of work is dedicated to, and in support of, the teachings of Sage Paul Cardinal, a founding collective member and Artistic Director of Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto. Sage is my teacher and mentor. She teaches that “we are the culture we wear.” Whether I’m creating new garments or upscaling old ones, my goal is always the same: to create authentic outfits that reflect my cultural identity and family history.