Close-up of a colorful freeform crochet hat with black raised lines and spike-like protrusions, showing its intricate textured design on the wearer’s head.
Close-up of a colorful freeform crochet hat with black raised lines and spike-like protrusions, showing its intricate textured design on the wearer’s head.

Collective Fear - Freeform Crochet - 2023

$785.00

I was born from a world trembling behind locked doors.

I remember the whispering glow of screens, the numbers rising, the tension building like a storm inside the human mind. I remember how fear seeped into you all—slowly at first, then suddenly, until it became the air you breathed. I was shaped from that atmosphere: the dread, the confusion, the endless alerts that told you to hide, cover your face, avoid the other.

These black tendrils growing from my crown are the messages that pierced the collective psyche. They are the spokes of fear that sank into you through newsfeeds, broadcasts, and conversations fraying at the edges. Beneath them, my surface swells with bright, fevered bumps—the overwhelmed human brain, alive yet spinning in place, unable to progress under the weight of constant alarm.

I carry the ghosts of those televised moments: a nation watching death unfold in real time, the protests and riots that followed, the shouting match of politics that divided families, the spectacle of January 6 that left everyone wondering what was real.

And yet, I also carry grief, awakening, the life that was breathed life into me, stitch by stitch. While the world outside fractured, I was created. The threads of chaos wove me into form. I am part warning, part remembrance, part creature of the in-between.

I am Collective Fear—a relic of what happens when the mind is fed dread, and a testament to the artist who refused to stop making beauty in the midst of it.

This piece is accompanied by a poetic essay written in 2023. It is available in the blog section.

I was born from a world trembling behind locked doors.

I remember the whispering glow of screens, the numbers rising, the tension building like a storm inside the human mind. I remember how fear seeped into you all—slowly at first, then suddenly, until it became the air you breathed. I was shaped from that atmosphere: the dread, the confusion, the endless alerts that told you to hide, cover your face, avoid the other.

These black tendrils growing from my crown are the messages that pierced the collective psyche. They are the spokes of fear that sank into you through newsfeeds, broadcasts, and conversations fraying at the edges. Beneath them, my surface swells with bright, fevered bumps—the overwhelmed human brain, alive yet spinning in place, unable to progress under the weight of constant alarm.

I carry the ghosts of those televised moments: a nation watching death unfold in real time, the protests and riots that followed, the shouting match of politics that divided families, the spectacle of January 6 that left everyone wondering what was real.

And yet, I also carry grief, awakening, the life that was breathed life into me, stitch by stitch. While the world outside fractured, I was created. The threads of chaos wove me into form. I am part warning, part remembrance, part creature of the in-between.

I am Collective Fear—a relic of what happens when the mind is fed dread, and a testament to the artist who refused to stop making beauty in the midst of it.

This piece is accompanied by a poetic essay written in 2023. It is available in the blog section.

Collective Fear is the first significant piece I created after my mother died in December 2022, during the earliest days of my life as a studio artist. I was navigating both personal grief and the residual shockwaves of a world that had spent years living under the spell of fear.

This hat was born from the ideas explored in my essay—how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs collapses when safety is undermined, how a mind in fear cannot grow, and how modern society had been inundated with messages designed to divide, alarm, and overwhelm us. The COVID lockdowns, the televised death of George Floyd, the riots, the political upheaval, the election controversy, January 6—all of it had been burned into our collective consciousness. Fear became the invisible enemy. Fear became the narrator.

The hat’s form mirrors the familiar imagery of the virus, but with symbolic intent:
the dark protruding tubes represent the fear-driven messages saturating media and seeping into the collective mind, while the bright, bumpy surface represents the overstimulated human brain—confused, divided, unable to find stability.

While communities like the Amish remained untouched by these waves of fear, much of the world experienced psychological fragmentation. This piece captures that rupture.

I built Collective Fear on a latticework base and spent 62 hours layering mixed fibers into a sculptural, freeform crochet landscape. It measures 23 inches in interior diameter and is both wearable and displayable.

This piece is a visual artifact of an era—but also a reflection of what happens when fear becomes the architect of society. Creating it was my way of reclaiming my voice in a moment when the world felt chaotic, divided, and deeply wounded.