Orange You Glad To See Me: Emotional Baggage Cart

Orange is the color of joy and creativity, joy as resistance. This cart, built from hollow braided polyurethane rope, gold and neon orange paracord, a neon orange zip-tie blanket, and solar LEDs on a gold-painted recovered shopping cart, holds what we carry.

We all move with emotional baggage, some a cart, some a backpack. Mine is shaped by a lifetime of racial trauma. These materials, bound and woven, speak to that weight: how it accumulates, constricts, and at times stalls us from intimacy and growth.

Yet the neon glow insists otherwise. Orange signals possibility, a refusal to be defined by the load. This piece asks how we carry what we’ve been given, and what it means to choose release, to move forward with joy.

Wordsmith (longest title)

Height: 43
Width: 35
Depth: 40
Photo credit: April Tracy

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H: 43" | W: 35" | D: 40"

Photo by April Tracy

Theda Sandiford

Kingshill, St Croix

My studio practice is a living laboratory, a dialogue between land, sea, and memory. I gather whispers from the wind, stories from tides, and wisdom from the soil, transforming seed pods, marine debris, and plant fibers through weaving, looping, knotting and beading. Rooted in sustainability, I craft cordage from organic and manmade materials found during my daily walks. My work merges gardening, foraging, assemblage, film, sound, and printmaking into site-specific explorations of African diasporic knowledge and trauma within landscapes scarred by colonial and environmental histories. These wounds, buried beneath roots and waves, demand acknowledgment. Through my art, I reclaim lost stories, honor sacred spaces, and invite viewers to witness, remember, and engage in collective healing. Together, we weave resilience into a reimagined future.

NBO Members Exhibition

Theda Sandiford

Wordsmith (longest title)