Longview: We emerged in the busy spring from what felt like a much needed, albeit brief, winter hibernation, and before that we spoke a lot about this need to honor rest. How do you recharge, physically, mentally, creatively? 

Tione Trice:I know that you know I love a nap. I try not to push myself through the day just as a preparation for a good night's sleep, because you really don’t know if you’re actually going to get a good night’s sleep!

When I feel my body is tiring, especially because I wake up so early in the am, I take a nap. Like, every space that I have has a bed or some kind of thing that allows for rest. 

To be able to nap. This is about work culture really, to not be obsessed with productivity, but to be open to maybe having an earlier or later workday to have a reset break. It’s about a moment in the day to be mindful and forget about all the other things for a bit and take care of yourself in a very intentional way. - In the midst of a photo shoot, I make sure I say that I will dip out for 45 minutes. Because I know I was there before the others and I will be there after them, so I need a moment.That is how I recharge.

I think there is a time in the year that is for family, and as I get closer and closer to that time in the year, my body does this thing that’s like a switch. It usually goes off around December 15. My body is like “ooh yea, we are about to go spend time with family”. I go to spend time with my mom from late December until like after my birthday in early January. So you know, in preparation for that I definitely take a day or a few to reset and clear my mind so that I would not go into my family’s house and feel heavy with work. I go into a mind space that reminds me of all the things I used to enjoy as a kid. 

L: So you use this transitional space to give yourself the moment to consciously go from one part of your life to another. That’s really smart.

T: You know my family is filled with women, and I know that the women in my family are handling business and money and kids and stuff, and it’s a high stress environment for them. I don’t want to be in a situation where I am arriving into a house still feeling stressed from work. As a kid you have no idea why people are stressed or how to make it easier, and I know my nieces and nephews and my family know this is a life I built for myself so if I am just going to be stressed, I need to find another path.

Perspective is just brilliant.Learning how to just be very present and grateful. Moments to take deep breaths and nourish myself the way I need to so I can show up for the people who need me when they need me. Juice, drink a ton of water.

L: As a collector, curator, merchant and steward of both creations of the past and the present, it is almost as if you tend to the makers, objects and collaborative processes as your garden. - Sowing seeds of projects and nurturing them into fruition, chaperoning growth and artists’ explorations of their various mediums, connecting their craft with your expertise and passion for spaces and stories. You make things bloom around you! What drew you towards this kind of work?

T: As long as I remember this is what I knew I was going to do.This was something I decided in middle school,so as long as I remember I knew this.

I have allowed myself to take little moments of doubt when I would try it in a different way, but it was always this. Like, maybe I could source, do sourcing and have a healthy living.It was always about working with makers and collecting. Working with previous partnerships, it was always objects and things, and often space and object. I know I am here for this. If I wasn’t doing this, there are two other options for me - I feel like I could have been a teacher, or a pastor.

But I find that also, like, what if there isn't such a thing as a mid life crisis, but rather a sense that for a portion of your life you commit to something, and then you can do something different. 

I just know that today, this is what I am supposed to do, but I don’t know about tomorrow.I am happy if I can have a clear understanding of what I need to do today.

L: Do you have an early memory of being in a garden or around plants? 

T: Yes! I think about this all the time, how my grandmother in Florida has such an amazing garden. And then I have to revisit the fact that she did not work, so she tended to this space all day long! When growing up in places like Florida and the south it was very normal to be surrounded by plants with fruits - she grew anything you can imagine, tropical trees, banana, coconut, collard greens. I don’t think my cousins and I were realizing that we would grow up and be in such different worlds, we kind of just thought that’s how it would continue. 

I remember when the family would gather, me and all my cousins would create an entire spread with fruits and plants and stuff, and this is the thing I am constantly reminded of as I try to create arrangements and things for the events I do, inspired by those presentations of fruits and petals. It was beautiful. When we were pulling leaves and making these presentations, we were always working to give our perspective to whatever the adults were doing.

Young parents, single or not, often try to prove that it was a good thing that they decided to parent at an early age - they are a bit workaholics, have kids but still want to show they can have two houses or something. I grew up alongside a lot of kids of parents who had a shit ton to prove. As a child of those parents you pick up on soul soothing techniques, ways to center yourself. I don’t think we ever discussed meditation in our household, but the young kids were meditating, like, early on, because you needed it. Bad Boy 2 came out when I was in high school, and that was when I think a lot of people around me really understood that they were meditating. We would all say “whoosaah”, we were all whoosah-ing,right, as he says in the movie. In the movie he goes to therapy and is taught this breathing technique for anger management and stress, saying whoosaah when taking a breath. 

It was before these conversations, in America, around mental health issues, therapy, meditations, all those things, was something for the masses. How in movies therapy would be talked about as something for someone who’s crazy. So when we saw this and heard something like whoosaah, it really just clicked, like “aaaaaaah, okay, so that’s like what we're doing”. So we still didn’t really know whether we were meditating, we would just say “Oh, I whoosaah”.

L: How would you describe your relationship with nature / the natural world?

T:It is honestly my relation to body, and being outdoors. You know I go on long walks, I am constantly in the park. I spend more time in the park than I actually do in my house. It is like a second skin. But it is also an organ, because without it I fail.  I feel like the last couple of months I was in New York, I felt closed in. It was freezing, and trying to rejuvenate myself, but being only indoors. I need to be outside, I need it, it’s not a thing that, like, I do for fun. 

L: Where do you feel this need?

T: I feel it in my heart, I feel it in my mind, it feels cloudy and a heavy heart. 

When I was little I would write letters to imaginary people who were in jail in my journal, and just describe how sad I felt that they had to be indoors and had no windows. I just could not imagine that. My family is from farms, from the beach, they’re from places where people spend time outside. My grandmother is from a cucumber farm, a very specific land, but it was also a swamp. We’re not born in New York City.

L: Do your family talk about this need?

T: NO! They basically say “how the hell do you live in New York, it’s a mess, there’s not even any trees”. And in that, you have to be able to pick up on that they have not been able to move more than 4 miles away from the beach!

My aunt lives on an island. Where I grew up I could ride my bike to the beach in ten minutes, but we also had a great backyard, with a pool, and lots of trees. I need all of the elements! That’s why I want to move to South Africa. Because I can be at the beach in two hours, and I can also be in the mountains. I think that’s why I do well on the West Coast too. I need all of it. But I also need the solitude of some of it too. Like Rockaways in NY, is just too many people haha.

L: In what ways, if any, does the natural world shape your work or the way you work? 

T:In all the ways! Like, I build plinths based off of things like this. (Holds up a trunk cut from a 70 year old palm tree.)

I always look to nature. This is how I am inspired, by shape, by color, it’s really based on my current relationship with space. Of The Cloth being in the Rockefeller Center space, in the city, I required so much more green life than I ever did because it was so challenging for me. Even though in theory I was eight blocks away from the park, those eight blocks made it feel so far away. Looking outside just seeing all these tall buildings. I require more when I am in those environments. 

Now my house is like a tree house, everywhere around me is shaded by trees and there’s and grass grass grass, and I notice that a lot of these shapes are coming in, like (holds up a textured earthenware sculpture). It is doing this weird curve thing, like the trees! I am really into that now because it plays a huge part in how I live and design, in what is important. 

L:Totally.There are so many different natural materials involved in the work that you show and create, wood, clay, seeds as beads, fibers for textiles, earthen pigments, a lot of nature connections that we have talked about. But stories of place and land, how important is this to you?

T:Place and land is a constant conversation in my work; of me finding roots and identity. Yesterday I went on a 5 hour walk, taking notes about…where, where were black people? They did a big job with Atlanta, they cleared everything, they worked on everything we see. We were here, doing things, building things. Sometimes with my work this is something I don’t communicate; how to create a world where all of that shit is de-centered. Where all those constant conversations about not feeling seen or not feeling heard, I have to take that in. This is what comes to me every day; a lot of black and brown conversations about people’s ideas being stolen. So I basically take all that in from space, from land. 

And so I am not someone who creates a mood board that has products - mine has text, and land. And from text and land I build the conversation. It is the root of what I do. Text and land. Because it is the only way to reimagine the conversation. 

To take this thing that you are being told, knowing that 80% of it is a lie. In those times I look at this happening to me, and think “so, this is a lie they are telling me and it is negative”, why can’t you reimagine a land and a conversation that is more beneficial? Say, when I find a ceramicist, I just imagine myself that she is the only woman maker in her village, but in my mind I tell myself as if she is in a community of women ceramicists. So again, it does not take on this energy of a token, but the energy of being empowered and a part of a community. Because a lot of the older makers I work with are really lonely. 

This is what I want people to feel in my work; I want them to feel nature, and I want them to feel like a hug. When I am clearing spaces to design them, I always tell the people who are helping me that I crave physical touch, but I don’t want to be touched. So the physical spaces are crucial, I want the space to give me a hug! Spatial physical touch! So that also when I am not there it is still doing what it is supposed to do, and it means that people who get to come in get to have a wonderful experience as well.

When you visit these places, it is like coming home, returning to a land, a space that holds so much. Take for example visiting the Door of No Return in Ghana, where the slaves were gathered, you feel it. It is not a conversation of religion, it is a feeling of being in a space with human history. If that can be true, the same can be true when someone is holding so much energy to make a space feel safe and good for others feeling comfortable expressing themselves. I want to be on that side. We should be creating spaces that way. 

You know, someone came to pick up something in my space the other day, right as I was preparing to have my aunt over for tea. I had music on with chimes and gongs. And this person looked around and asked “Is this a spa?! What’s this smell?” And I was like, “I live here, that’s incense, and you don’t have to whisper. I live here!” I showed them around the space a bit and as we went outside they said that they couldn’t remember the last time they were in a space so relaxing and that it felt really good. Hahahaha.

I feel like objects, floral, plant life, and ritual related to it, is just needed more than ever. There is just too much on our plates. We are individuals with intense real life experiences, and now we also have to run other lives alongside it, a.k.a. social media. When I think of people who are good at that stuff, I wonder how?!? - At this point you have no choice but to have a practice of soothing. Take a bath and take a nap. We are just so overworked. 

L: Yes, and we need to constantly remind ourselves of ourselves in the middle of it all, of authenticity.

T: I am currently thinking a lot about having to rewrite all the stories that we tell ourselves around space and place and ritual, because whatever I need I have to sustain today - whatever I need is going to have to come from this space where I am right now. So now more than ever I am looking at plant life, and looking at things you can plant that you can grow in your kitchen that smells good. I have never looked at this many herbs! Thinking that if I have some mint…then I can make lime and mint water! Things that just smell and look good.

L: Yes, and even something so simple can make you feel like you’re taking care of yourself.

T: Yes, that makes so much sense! I have been thinking, why does this feel this way? Why does this feel different than something I have done before, but I think it is because of the intention for me to connect.

L: What do you think of as your plant community?

T:I feel like now I am craving these energies and space from times when I am not stressed. All the things I am tied to right now are things that would have been in my grandmother’s backyard. So a lot of avocado, a lot of mango, lime, lemon, grapefruit, banana. Also things that are beautiful. I love having these bowls filled with lime in my space, it is so lovely walking past, they smell so nice, and you can do a little shaving of them. I am looking at bringing in as many things as I can that can be either edible or medicinal.

What I notice is that right now I am really into plants that are constantly birthing a thing. Plants that don’t just do a flower and die out, but that are constantly rebooting, reinventing themselves. For me it just feels alive.

I am also having a moment of plants that are self reflecting, like they fold up and go into themselves as if to reflect and then they burst open again, and again and again. In the same way that I need my surroundings to allow for a down moment before coming back energetically.

Walking around here in Atlanta I see so many things that you guys used for the Etvernal branch arrangements you have made for me. Like the pods with the seeds inside that when dried up they rattle when you shake them! I walk past a tree of them like every day and it is so fun to recognize it. 

I am now more than ever into that kind of thing that when you possess something it keeps having its own life, still living even when in our space, doing its thing. Everything for me right now, plant and floral wise, it’s about life, not possession. I don’t want to possess anything that is not going to get to do its own thing or grow in the way that it desires. Something that still speaks after being put in a vase. 

L: You’ve been talking a lot about being drawn towards herbs now, do you turn to plants for medicine, cooking or healing? Or for something else?

T:This is a new world for me, the healing side of plants. Because when younger I have typically just been fine with sleeping more or a glass of orange juice to help a cold to go away…, but now my body and mind is demanding things from me so I can do my projects and follow my passions. So it is a new world for me, but it is really exciting! Having support from family is really important as I make it a thing and keep it a conversation now, as I try to go as all natural as possible in my life. My thought is that if we are going to be under so much stress, how are we going to get out of it unless we change things? 

L:Yes, everything that we can learn about taking care of ourselves now, it is for this moment, but it is also for the future, for the rest of our lives and even more importantly for new generations. Thankfully at least we are at an age now when these topics have become more interesting to us to share and talk about haha.

T: Absolutely, we should all know more about our bodies and our health. Like, how my great grandmother couldn't just got to a doctor because of all the racial segregation and things, and so her and her people, they knew how to heal each other. She is 99! She would brew things that smelled horrible, make concoctions, and you look up and know that a doctor said she had not much longer to live, and now it’s 30 years later! A lot of it is a mind conversation too, believing that you really want to and can live. When at her house I remember talking about stuff that people are talking about now, like seamoss. She was like “you don’t know what spirulina is?” 

L: Truly. The people who sit on such a well of knowledge of plants and healing, they are such treasures. 

T: Before now they were all viewed as weirdos, but now finally one is viewed as someone who just wants to take care of themselves.

L: On your quest for plant medicine and healing, where do you turn towards to seek that out?

T: People. I tend to go places. I find a handful of shops where like the “witches” are, and then I ask. I love being a student. I love being a student, sit me down on the floor in front of you and tell me all the things. I always say this, “pretend that I am 5 years old and know nothing”. Because if you think I know about this thing, then you won’t tell me about that thing, and then there’s a missing piece. So just tell me everything. That way I get some of the weird stories that I would not get otherwise.

I find there to be some really beautiful communities, of mostly women, that are coming together that are like health and wellness gurus, but coming together and sharing resources amongst themselves and their communities. It feels like Atlanta here has become one of those hubs. Is it becoming a lot easier to connect that way; you find one and they connect you to four others.

L: On your quest for plant medicine and healing, where do you turn towards to seek that out?

T: People. I tend to go places. I find a handful of shops where like the “witches” are, and then I ask. I love being a student. I love being a student, sit me down on the floor in front of you and tell me all the things. I always say this, “pretend that I am 5 years old and know nothing”. Because if you think I know about this thing, then you won’t tell me about that thing, and then there’s a missing piece. So just tell me everything. That way I get some of the weird stories that I would not get otherwise.

I find there to be some really beautiful communities, of mostly women, that are coming together that are like health and wellness gurus, but coming together and sharing resources amongst themselves and their communities. It feels like Atlanta here has become one of those hubs. Is it becoming a lot easier to connect that way; you find one and they connect you to four others.

L: Do you have a favorite season, or time of day? Are there any rituals you connect with this time?

T: My favorite time of day, anytime, anywhere, is from 4am to 5.45am. Very specifically before people get outside.This is the time when my day starts and I feel that the world is kind of still. I feel like enough people are asleep and it just feels settled. I wake up, start my meditation, do some writing and typically take a 15 minute bath. If I don’t have to work, or it is a snow storm -I love a snow storm! I just want everyone to stay in their house haha! - or if it’s a Sunday, I will get outside right away when people are sleeping in. Getting to be outside, experiencing it, without honking horns or people getting ready to make money. I love when I am up  before people feel the pressure of life.I get to be with myself, I don’t think about work. I need all those hours to have just for me.

L: Describe your dream garden.(Or a garden from a dream?!)

T:My dream home is in a garden. I build it out for like eight to ten years maybe, so that some of the garden is mature. Maybe I tend to a garden for a while and I get all these things to grow up.

The place is like the huge botanical garden in Pennsylvania, Longwood Gardens. It is just beautiful. The succulent garden there is so amazing. Any photos of that space don’t at all do it justice, but that space is pretty much how I would want to live. But with a small house! Very simple. Only two bedrooms, two bathrooms. Even if I had six kids! 

I am really into sculptures and things you know, but I don’t need a house to show them, as they are indoor-outdoor! I want a bunch of ceramic stools under grape trees, and to live somewhere where we can be outside the majority of the time. My house should be really lush and I can walk outside to grab fruits and herbs. But it is also a garden which won’t be a problem if I can’t figure some parts of it out, like some parts are unkempt, parts that the environment is able to take care of. Plantings for the land not for beautifications. It’s made to really nourish. 

I want to go back to the conversations about taking the best practices from the past, and how living with nature makes us happier and healthier, and not have to just visit nature. 

“Live with natuuuuure”. *sings*. Haha.