What is your relationship with mirrors and your reflection as you experience it now?

I see mirrors as portals. They're deeply spiritual to me—the start of so much of what we end up bringing into our realities. As a child I used to position a mirror behind me and trip out over the endless reflection tunnel; it's the closest I could get to understanding "infinity." The lore around broken mirrors fascinates me too. It seems very human to want to avoid a fragmented projection of self, and to want to see yourself only as whole.

Has aging made you more attentive to your body, or less preoccupied with it? In what ways has growing older expanded your sense of self?

I recently began to embrace the changes in my skin's elasticity, the multiplication of beauty marks at my temples, new freckles, creases—details I notice on older Black women. I feel inducted into a special part of society now that I have more of what the women I admire have.

When you have a child, you become aware of how fully formed people are from the moment they enter the world. The world influences away what was essentially our truest self, and we spend our lives trying to get back to it. That's part of the beauty of aging for me. I'm coming back to myself. The rest of my life will feel like an uncovering, not a covering up.

What does your vanity look like on most days?

Usually messier than this. My "vanity" is a mid-century sideboard with a heavy antique mirror on top—pieces I've collected, kept close because of what they mean. Stainless steel candlesticks from Etagere vintage, loved for years. A small pearl vessel found at a place in India called Art House. A vessel of amber stones from a friend, waiting on a plan to make my own oil someday. A Polaroid of my daughter and me on her fourth birthday, propped against the mirror. A silver tray with makeup, nail polish, moisturizer, and a bottle of Wooden Spoon tincture. A box of incense topped with a ceramic sphere made by an old friend—its original companion piece long since separated from it. A note from a friend in France that just says take care.

There is an insistence on care in your practice. How has your relationship to preservation—of materials, of memory—shifted over time?

I feel strongly about being a steward of the objects that come into my life—passing something on when that's meaningful, or mending it when that's what it needs. So many of my memories are preserved through the act of making and mending. I still think about the thrashed pair of Levi's I once connected with, and the days of wearing them down before that.

I love old things that already have a story, and I love adding patina to something new and watching my own story show through the wear. I use antique and vintage textiles in my work for exactly this reason—and I feel a real conviction to do right by the makers whose materials I'm working with.