Gaia in the Anthropocene

The Scroll

My morning ritual has become three pages in cursive, to steady my brain before the world gets shows up. This Monday I tapped Instagram first, and the slush got in.

The feed served me a stream of claims I hadn't verified: Trump buying gas from Putin, a Nobel Peace Prize he didn't get (again!), a Ukrainian strike on a Russian data center rumored to house a bot farm. I pictured its accounts, @patriot0034 or @trumpwon4547_0831, run by someone living their best life in the Philippines ;-). That last one caught my hope and my attention.

If attention is my morning's currency, I spent it like a zombified slots player, pulling the lever of rage bait over and over, waiting for a payout that never comes.

Being Played

When I built Being Played at the World Chess Hall of Fame, I was designing a room about attention or lack therof. I put the fashion at the center, sparkling and made from deadstock, so we would gather around it like magpies. Around the perimeter of that same room, the walls were darkly lit in red. You noticed them last.

I carried a delusional prayer into that show: that we might come together the way we briefly did after 9/11. Then COVID closed the exhibition early, and for a moment we did come together, apart, through our screens. And then, eventually, conspiracies, misinformation, our leadership and fear tore us apart once more.

"...Nf4," imaginary spacesuits I imagined an AI had designed for humans to escape Earth. In 2019, it was science fiction. Photo: Alise O'Brien

The Lungs of the Earth

The one thing I hoped could finally unite us was the planet itself. Even as kids, we were screaming about the damage to it. I grew up with a rap about the tropical rainforest and all of its beauty, and I couldn't understand how anyone would want to destroy a place that holy. The lungs of the earth. Going back further, before I was born, Joni Mitchell was singing a similar warning in "Big Yellow Taxi," and surely others did before her.

Rain Forest Rap

Then, on September 2, 2019, I sat down to write the essay for Being Played. Parts of the Brazilian rainforest had been burning for four weeks. Many of those fires were set to clear land for cattle and farming, and people blamed President Jair Bolsonaro for pushing deforestation and turning a blind eye to the loggers, ranchers and miners lighting them. Bolsonaro called it fake news. The place from that childhood song, the lungs of the earth, was on fire while I wrote.

Years later, Bolsonaro was convicted and sentenced to 27 years, not for the forest, but for plotting a coup. Accountability arrived by a strange route, but it arrived. Maybe that's a little foreshadowing: even the most powerful players on the board can eventually be caught.

Has anything changed? Or has it only gotten worse? This fall, landslides and floods have torn through Nepal, Pacific hurricanes have sent storms and deadly surf to California, and wildfires keep burning across North America. Maybe we were being played even still.

The Egregore

The crux of Being Played was a superpower, something bigger than us, and I left it for the viewer to name. A supercomputer? God? Time? The planet turning on its axis toward yet another climate evolution?

While making the work, I learned about the egregore and secretly gave that name to the exhibition’s perimeter. An egregore is an old occult idea: an entity born from the collective attention of a group, which takes on a life of its own and starts shaping the people who feed it.

Image from Being Played at The World Chess Hall of Fame and Galleries. Photo: Attilio D'Agostino

I didn't fully understand what I had named until now, and maybe I still have more to discover. The Egregore is our attention, harvested. The bots, the rage bait, the data centers drinking our water all exist to capture where we look, and the machines have done exactly what they were built to do. Divide and conquer.

While we stare at the sparkle, the grab happens in the red space along the walls, with those in the highest positions of power twisting the narrative. That is predatory delay, and it only works because our eyes are elsewhere.

In 2019, I wrote that the color red stood for or was inspired by HAL 9000, the machine. I didn't know how literal that would become. ChatGPT didn't even exist until November 2022.

The irony of using an AI agent to help me edit my thoughts and spelling (undiagnosed dyslexia anyone?) on this post is not lost on me.

Anthropocene Gaia

The hope of becoming climate secure, of holding corporations accountable, feels diminished today. But finally seeing the force for what it is feels like a rally call.

No one but those in power wants a data center. Is it our water they want? Our intelligence? Our attention? More power and influence? All of it? Why are we letting tech billionaires be the architects of what we see and feel? When is enough enough? I think about a righteous and inspiring line all the time from the band Austra in the song “Future Politics," Katie Stelmanis beautifully shrieks “I’m not a coward like them, I don’t need more money”.

The Egregore lives only on what we feed it. Gaia, the living planet, keeps breathing for us whether we look or not. Every morning I get to choose: three pages in cursive, or the lever. Where will I put my attention? Where will we put our attention?

“Go forth from me a virgin…” Visions of Dolly

A few months ago, Dolly Parton came to me in a dream and yesterday we lost more than a legend.

August 25th, 2026, a day that smothered like a heavy dark mass. I reflected, like so many of us did, on the otherworldly transcendence of Dolly Parton. We lost a dear friend who, for most of us, has sat shotgun the entire ride. It hurts.

As a designer and an artist, I keep looking for how she might have influenced my work, and I can't find her mark anywhere. Apart from the time in the mid 80s when I directed my little sister to stuff a pillow under her shirt and put a doily on her head while I recorded her on our early VHS Magnavox, lip-syncing "I Will Always Love You." She was quite adept at lip-syncing. For both of our sakes, I hope it never resurfaces.

:”Behind the Seams” a christmas gift from my partner Jeffrey.

For me she was a North Star in a complicated world where I find myself wary of having any human idols. But if I did, Madonna would be the Iconoclast, the fire stealer; Tori Amos the Oracle, the Orpheus; and Dolly Parton the benevolent one, the Hermes who everybody loves. Of the three, she is the one I can't stop thinking about today.

But last night, exhausted and making comfort food to soothe my soul, I remembered that a few months ago Dolly came to me in a wild, vivid dream. Recording my dreams has become a bit of a hobby. They are so clear and sometimes terrifying, but they are nothing short of miraculous, and often they find their way into my work.

Below is the text of that dream, which I quickly dictated into my notes app, which is why some of it is hard to understand.

Oct 16, 2025, 6:38 AM

"Dolly Parton is in my dreams last night. She's in her trailer with this gigantic sewing machine that had an option resser (presser?) foot. I get the impression it's hard for her to slow down. She is studding her shoes for the shows and at some point she's having a lot of trouble and the girls (her handlers) fix it at one point we are all gathered around her she pull me aside starting to slip on 1860s floral brocade and leather lace up boots that she got on very easily (I remember it gliding on quickly) with cover passes pia asses (???) went down and she had told me some very wise stuff, including that I should "Go forth from me a virgin and have presence in your veins", and then she lit a bush of sage"

Needless to say, I had a fantastic day. Those words have stuck with me. "Go forth from me a virgin and have presence in your veins." My interpretation: see the world as a child, and know that this moment is all we have.

I got to meet Dolly that night in my sleep.

That direction has found its way into a few of my works. I was hoping to land it in the joint 21C Hotels show that Heather Bennett and I have up right now, but alas, it was cut at the last minute in editing.

Dolly was my North Star for leaving the world better than you found it. People are flawed, but Dolly's flaws seemed few. In a world that feels so depraved, so greedy, so full of hate, it's crushing to lose your guiding light. But we have her words. We have her music, her laughter, her pranks. Her generosity and thoughtfulness will keep surprising us in ways we can't predict.

We even have one more song, that we know of. Locked away in a chestnut box at Dollywood is a song she recorded in 2015. On her 100th birthday, January 19th, 2046, we will open her box, aptly named the "Dream Box," a box named for dreams. Of course she left us that.

You're crying I'm not crying.

So I did find her mark, in my veins, stitched on cloth, embroidered on silk.

One can only hope she has a few more mystic visions left to impart on me. Knowing Dolly, she does. 🦋

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“Go forth a virgin and have presence in your veins” Embroidered handknit deadstock elastic and wool sleeveless pullover.

A little mouse in a house and she was the cat.

Susan and my chessboard before the game.

Last month, July 28th, to be exact, I had the great honor of being one of 49 artists, scholars, and curators to play a chess simul against Grandmaster Susan Polgar at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. The event commemorated two things simultaneously: the Marcel Duchamp exhibition spanning his life’s work, and his birthday. He would be 139 years old today.

The battle was a long thrill ride. Each of her opponents, mostly grown adults, minus an 11-year-old who was the second-to-last eliminated were giddy as school children to be walloped by a former child prodigy in her own right.

I was invited in early January and waited without exhaling, entirely due to my own superstitions about counting my pawns before they promote to queens. Queening! (See what I did there?) As the event was pushed back further and further, I began to chase silver linings: perhaps my daily Sisyphean task of training would at least make me fun at parties, or at parks with strangers.

In 2018, my friend Shannon Bailey, curator at the World Chess Hall of Fame, offered to have my first solo show. At the time, it felt like a story best told through the lens of chess, climate change, fashion, and a science fiction romp. Making pretty clothes for people to gawk at felt flat; I wanted to know what was my role, what could serve beauty but also enlighten myself and hopefully others. It changed my life’s trajectory like nothing I could have ever imagined. It proved to me, in joyous and painful ways, that I was more than just a “Fashion Designer.” I was an artist, dare I say, maybe even a scholar. For a game with so many restrictions and regulations, chess feels to me like a boundless art form within itself, a contact sport of science, strategy, history, and logic. I will forever be grateful to Shannon and WoCHoF for the opportunity.

...Nxe5 Dress made from deadstock bra underwire (2019)

That realization gave me the audacity to keep studying and creating, which ultimately ushered me into MoMA, looking across the board at the world's first female Grandmaster. What a thrill. Chess, like any great passion, has taught me that the more I participate, the less I really know. The older I get, the more I’ve learned to enjoy rejection, “hand me my leather,” I suppose. The act allows for introspection and, hopefully, growth, so that I can roll the boulder up, get it over the hill, and see the next one on the horizon.

My game with Susan also felt like a metaphor for life. I came in with a strategy, but immediately she made the move I least wanted: 1. e4. Ugh. She was three steps ahead of me every time, though at least I was able to castle kingside. Still, to no avail; like everyone else, defeat was imminent. All in all, after a little under three hours, deep breaths, and 38 moves, I shook hands with Susan and sat in the most beautiful surrender.

.

Post Covid momentum

Dress in process… hand bent and machine sewn bra underwires onto a vinyl base.

For about the last four years, it has been a challenge to be even remotely inspired to make my art or clothing. I have always been a bit of a futurist with my eye partially locked on the rearview mirror. The confusions over where we are headed as a planet, our health, what is truly important, the paths I hope we take, and finally my next act have weighed very heavily on me. This has been a game of waiting and patiently listening to the world around me. For me, silence and distance always bring about clarity.

With all of this said, I am thrilled to be adopting a new paradigm in my approach to design and art, pushing the work to be even more sustainable and thoughtful as I progress. I will be documenting this process, allowing anyone to know more about this journey in this journal here.

Starting June 15th, my workspace will change, having signed a lease with MADE Makerspace in the Makers District of St. Louis. I will have access to all of the machinery (laser cutters, embroidery machines, CNC lathes, wood shop, metal smithing) and a dedicated studio space to create among so many talented artists. It is the perfect fit. So please follow me on this next chapter as we push forward.

Thankfully,

-M

CNC laser cutter

Studio space and partner Photographer Danielle.