Cocoon stands as a towering 10-foot gown, its form part dress, part dwelling, part sacred space. It welcomes visitors to step inside, to be enveloped. Set on the ancestral lands of the Manhanset people of Shelter Island—now Sylvester Manor—Cocoon honors the enduring power of women as makers, keepers, and carriers of culture.

This sculpture is both shelter and symbol. It evokes the unseen labor of women in early colonial life—Indigenous, African, and European alike—whose stories remain largely unrecorded, but whose presence shaped the Manor’s earliest days. The gown’s shape is inspired by women’s clothing from the mid-1600s, when Sylvester Manor was founded, but its open design reimagines those forms as welcoming and transformative instead of confining.

Inside Cocoon, the viewer becomes part of the narrative. It asks us to reflect on how women across time have created sanctuaries—in homes, in communities, in resistance. Here, the gown becomes a vessel: for memory, for resilience, for the layered histories woven into this land.