The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room began with a chair — two of them, actually, found at a Goodwill. Keilhauer 3513 healthcare waiting room chairs. The same kind I sat in across twelve years of appointments, diagnoses, and devastating news while carrying fibroids the size of a cantaloupe, an orange, and several plums inside my body, invisibly, while appearing completely fine on the outside.

This installation is built from my actual medical history.
The cyanotype images on the first chair, Hope, are my MRI scans, my pelvic X-ray, and photographs from my myomectomy, printed in Prussian blue on cotton canvas and stapled to the chair frame. A line of yellow-orange embroidery thread traces the surface — not decoration, but scar. The shape of what a myomectomy leaves behind.

The back of the chair is deliberately unfinished and undone, the way Black women are expected to hold themselves together in waiting rooms, on exam tables, in public — while quietly falling apart where no one can see. My husband’s palm print is pressed into the back — the shape of his hand on my back through every appointment, every diagnosis, every scan, every surgery, every breakdown.

The second chair, Despair, is covered in the pharmaceutical and emotional debris of a single IVF cycle. Follistim. Menopur. Ganirelix. Kelnor. Ortho Tri-Cyclen. Syringes. And the emails: the estimated cost of the PGS test we were asked to consider on top of everything else, the documented side effects of the Femview test, and the final message from my clinic letting me know the transfer was indeed unsuccessful. One round was all we could afford. One round broke me.

Embedded in the chaos are two resin-cast plum halves — the shape of the fibroids that caused my infertility. One holds two pearls for the embryos that were transferred together and didn’t take. The other holds one pearl for the baby we lost to the ectopic pregnancy.

On the back of Despair, in my own handwriting: I Forgive You. A note to myself and my body. To the systems that failed me. And to the version of me who believed that parenthood could only look one way — I forgive her too.
The Waiting Room asks what Black women carry invisibly and what it looks like to finally set it down.

This is my Rich Auntie era

🎥 Watch The Making of The Waiting Room: Part 1, Hope

📼Watch The Making of The Waiting Room: Part 2,  Despair & Redemption