Dawn Market, Mended Awning

There’s a kind of morning that only arrives in the market—before the day’s heat, when everything is half-unfolded. Making this piece was like piecing together years of waking memory: the weight of plastic buckets under your arm, the snap of an awning rehung after a storm, the impossible tangle of laundry lines running above the food stalls. The work refused to let me hide any of the labor. Every repair shows. I wanted the colors to feel like a held breath—the yellow from ferry decks at dawn, the red faded by so many hands, the green that lifts out of wet fabric drying over concrete. I kept sewing through old doubts: is this too much care? Am I disguising or admitting what was broken? There is no way to force a seam into honesty; you patch, you show your hand. What remains is warmth, yes, but also friction—the way a tarp rubs against rope, the sound of morning, the ordinary courage of starting over.