My work, After Silence, A Song, is a mixed-media assemblage approximately 24″x16″, created with natural and found materials including cicada shells, seed pods, bark, textile remnants, paper scrolls, embroidery hoops, and hand-worked fiber. The composition is structured with concentric circles and geometric framing, layered with organic forms that suggest growth, emergence, and offering. Presented as a wall-hung piece, it serves as a contemplative “visual blessing,” inviting the viewer into a dialogue with cycles of silence, waiting, and transformation.

The making of this piece has been an act of slowing down and listening. Collecting cicada shells, pods, and fibers became a practice of attentive observation—pausing to notice what is shed, what falls away, and what is left behind in nature’s cycles. In the studio, I worked with silence, allowing materials to guide placement rather than forcing design. The repetition of wrapping, bundling, and arranging circles became a meditative rhythm, mirroring contemplative prayer or breath.

I have engaged directly with the woods and creekside environments, gathering what nature has already relinquished—husks, bark, pods, and fibers. The cicada shells especially speak to transformation and the unseen life that occurs in silence, underground, before bursting forth. These collected elements carry with them both memory and presence, bringing the textures and cycles of the natural world into the work.

Annie Dillard writes, “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” This work is my attempt to “be there”—to witness and hold fragments of the unnoticed. The cicada shells, the humble scrolls of paper, the seed pods—each is a vessel of grace that might otherwise be overlooked. In shaping them into a mandala-like offering, I am engaging the text as a meditation on how silence, absence, and emergence are all part of the same continuum.

How can silence be made visible?

What does transformation look like at its quietest, most overlooked stages?

In honoring discarded husks and remnants, am I lifting them into song or simply amplifying silence?

I have learned that silence is never empty—it holds memory, transformation, and waiting. The cicada shells taught me this most vividly: they are silent, brittle husks, yet they testify to the unseen life beneath the soil and the ecstatic sound that follows emergence. In assembling this work, I learned to trust the slow process of layering, and that contemplation can be embodied in both material and form.