When she was five, Theda Sandiford was beat up by a band of second grade girls.
“How did you let that happen?” Theda’s Bajan and Trinidadian dad admonished her, when she came home distraught from school.
The girls had put gum in Theda’s wild-yet-decidedly-not-kinky coils. With a Polish and German mother, who explained that Theda’s complexion made her “special,” and a father of the Silent Generation, Theda was left to cut out the gum herself.
“I had to go look in the library how to do my hair,” the artist, now 55 and sporting locked salt-and-pepper hair, shares from her Jersey City, N.J. studio. “The only books there were like, ‘here’s how you do your pressing curl.’”
Hair, its complexities and symbolisms, the microaggressions it evokes, is a driving throughline of Sandiford’s oeuvre.
In “Chutes and Ladders” (2018), Sandiford wraps, knots, sews and crochets found materials onto thick polyurethane rope, a deconstructed net. Delicate eyelash yarn, representing fragility, sprouts from the lower rungs; but as the eye traverses up metaphorical ladders, the tightening knots of this jungle gym become a cage, the looping rope hangs from a Z-rack like a noose.
“It’s really commentary on my experience as a Black woman in corporate America,” says Sandiford, who uses almost exclusively found materials in her sculpture and installation work. “I was at a point where I was like, now that I know what this ladder really looks like, is this the ladder I want to be on?”
Sandiford made a career flying between New York City and Los Angeles in the music industry, yet calls “Chutes and Ladders” one of the hardest things she’s ever worked on. Both because the rope weighs over 100 pounds — and before procuring a Z-rack she used to lay on the couch with it as she worked — and because of her emotional distress at the time she was working on it. But it’s not just that the materiality and the emotions go hand-in-hand. “The choice of the materials was governed by what I was dealing with,” Sandiford says.
This emphasis on materiality permeates every inch of the interdisciplinary artist’s Jersey City studio, which she tends while visiting the greater New York city region to take care of her elderly mother.
Shopping carts from her “Emotional Baggage Carts” series, in addition to six new carts donated by the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, fill one corner. Ladders covered in beaded bottle caps, an earlier iteration of similar themes explored in “Chutes,” lean against another wall. The four wigs Sandiford wore during the pandemic, before she locked her hair, stand as soldiers awaiting orders aside a gaping doorframe.
But currently, it’s an orange bucket of scraps that Sandiford is most preoccupied with.
“As I have an idea for something, I just sort of walk around,” says the artist, who has been collecting “treasures” since her childhood days of exploring Brooklyn and Queens beaches until the city lights came on. Today, this practice results in carefully labeled boxes brimming with driftwood, fishing nets, palm fronds and whatever else catches her eye either in St. Croix (where she now resides full-time) or in New York.
“I pull out different boxes and things say, ‘pick me, pick me, use me.’ They're already in my collection of things to work with in the studio. So there's already an intent there. It's a matter of being called into being, that what I'm either emotionally dealing with or what I want to communicate with.”
In this case, Sandiford plans to use what she calls an “intentional, mindful bucket of crap” to help manage her emotions regarding her mother’s ailing health.
It’s a catharsis — whether it be about growing up mixed in Westchester, New York, or navigating misogyny in the music industry — that powers all of the artist’s work.
“If you know you're an artist, it's your job to break things and sometimes make it complicated and see the connections between things that other people that are just going through the routine of their lives don't see. That's what art does; it’s supposed to surprise and delight,” says Sandiford.
But it wasn’t until 2004, with her parents in the hospital and finding herself in a constant state of worrying and waiting, that Sandiford first (re)turned to yarn — she’d learned to knit from her grandmother as a child — and unknowingly launched what would become an esteemed career as an artist.
“As I was [knitting], I realized, wow, I'm calming my mind. I'm really kind of managing this anxiety that I feel,” she says. “And so I realized that this isn't just art, right? This is health, certainly mental health…and then when you think about, wow, that's your job, it really meant a lot to find that doing something that could be my job was actually doing something good for me.”
0 comments