Riptides explores mothers and daughters across four generations, telling layers of stories of women as they embrace/reject these critical relationships. Moving from infancy and girlhood to leaving home, and from marriage and motherhood to her own daughter leaving home, each woman struggles in her own era and in her own way with conflicting imperatives to both stay and leave. Utilizing the Ocean Waves quilt pattern from a family quilt, the artist drew from the histories of her great- grandmother, grandmother and mother as well as herself to create the visible and the hidden text.

Riptides was created with vintage and new materials, using techniques of text transfer, dry mount and sewing. The text is set in VinerHand and Abadi MT Pro fonts.