Cicada Summer – A project about women coming of age and finding their voice

In the summer of 2024, a rare double emergence of 13- and 17-year cicada broods occurred for the first time in 200 years. Feeling an urgency to respond, I began working with their discarded wings, creating a choker necklace, I painted the wings and a cicada body gold and attached them to a piece of found jewelry.

The series began with my daughter as she came of age, wearing the necklace and a dress I had saved for decades. It expanded to include young women among the trees where the cicadas lived that summer. Creative, ambitious, and resilient, they are finding their voices in a world already in crisis. This work is for them.

Like cicadas, they emerge after long seasons of becoming. Their voices break through—and the world is changed.