“The water spirit cautioned the woman that now since the color blue had come down to earth to stay, it was a sacred duty to guard the indigo and that only women should handle the indigo pots. The woman was to carry her new knowledge back to the village and instruct the women there how to make the blue juice live happily in the cloth for all the people.”

How Indigo Came to Libéra, adapted by the artist

My process for the social practice installation is research-based and embodies many components that contribute to the whole but are not central to the final piece. If the viewer looks to the aesthetic to inform the meaning and process, they won't find it.

However, with additional probing -- Why indigo? How was it made? Who made it? Why are we participants? -- the viewer may discover the work's contextual richness.

From the participatory component to the women who labored together to make "the indigo live happily in the cloth for all the people” to the folklore, How indigo dye came to Liberia that inspired the collaborative work there is an unfixing and coming together happening.

My work with indigo is also a meditation on its fraught history, a history that includes the labor of enslaved Africans and colonial cultivation and extraction of a natural resource for profit. Considering all the above, the final piece engenders the possibilities of working together against systems of domination.