Before the Tent Goes Up: What I’m Carrying Into the First Market of the Year

There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens before the first market of the year.

Not the calm kind, more like the hush right before something announces itself.

Bins get stacked and unstacked. Corners of prints are checked with more tenderness than they probably need. Fabrics are folded, unfolded, refolded. Pieces that have traveled with me for years sit beside pieces that still feel almost too new to touch.

This is the moment before the tent goes up.

And this year, it feels different.

Not because everything is new, but because everything isn’t.

For my first market of the year on February 7, I’m bringing work from different chapters of my creative life. Some of it has been with me a long time. Some of it is still finding its voice. All of it belongs here.

I will be at the Baton Rouge Art Market from 8 am to Noon, in the St Joseph parking lot, near the corner of Fifth and Main.

I’m not making a clean break.

I’m carrying the lineage.

There are pieces I’ve brought to many markets before.

Digital collage prints: images that began as stories and still feel like doorways. Oval-framed prints that ask to be lingered over instead of glanced at. Cotton and denim crossbody bags that have should be worn into daily life, carried through errands and festivals, and ordinary afternoons.

These works are part of how people first found me.

They’re also part of how I learned what it means to put art into the world and watch it be received.

They taught me how people pause.

What they ask about.

What they hold onto.

So they’re coming with me again, not out of habit, but out of respect.

And then there’s the newer work.

The quieter work.

The stranger work.

The work that doesn’t quite behave like “products.”

Story Relics - objects that feel less like things to buy and more like things to keep. Pieces that carry narrative weight, memory, and the sense of having already lived a life before they meet you.

Unbelongings - small, deliberate acts of unease and tenderness. These aren’t meant to decorate a room so much as haunt it gently. They ask different questions. They sit differently in the body.

And the velvet tote bags - lush, tactile, unapologetically soft. A little indulgent. A little defiant. Made to be carried close, to be felt as much as seen.

This newer work changes the relationship.

It moves from image to object.

From observer to keeper.

From “Do you like this?” to “Does this belong with you?”

Bringing all of this to the same table is vulnerable.

It means letting people see the evolution in real time.

It means not hiding the seams between chapters.

It means trusting that even as the materials shift, the soul of the work hasn’t.

Because the truth is, I didn’t pivot away from what I was doing.

I followed it deeper.

The digital collage work led me toward story.

Story led me toward objects.

Objects led me toward touch, weight, and intimacy.

This market isn’t a contradiction.

It’s a conversation between past and present.

There’s a temptation, at the start of a new year, to believe we’re supposed to arrive fully resolved. To present a clean narrative. To pretend the work didn’t grow gradually, messily, honestly.

But art doesn’t really work that way.

Neither do people.

So this Saturday, everything will sit together under one tent:

The images that opened the door.

The objects that ask you to step through it.

The experiments that feel a little risky.

The pieces that feel like old friends.

Past selves.

Present work.

Future directions, still unfolding.

The tent isn’t up yet.

But it will be soon.

And when it is, I’ll be there, with all of it.