To Be Held (2026) is a functional sculpture by artist
Tranashea Hyman. Made primarily during her
residency with Charlotte Is Creative at the McColl
Center in North Carolina, the piece is a rocking chair
meticulously constructed from wood, velvet, cotton,
and acrylic screenprint. Measuring 41 in x 37.5 in x
23.5 in, the work was produced after the artist’s
return to her hometown after seven years of living
abroad in England.
The piece serves as a profound meditation on the
gendered labor of sustaining community and the

presence of the artist’s own mother in her life.
To make the chair, Hyman measured the seat back height from the length of her own
neck to her lower back and tailored her width to her specific hip dimensions, ensuring
that the chair’s architecture was uniquely customized to her body, mirroring the bespoke
nature of a mother’s engagement with her child.
The physical fabrication of the work represents a rigorous, multi-disciplinary exercise in
a labour of love, where the artist maintained total agency over every stage of
production. From initial sketches to the structural woodworking, screenprinting, and final
upholstery, the artist utilized her own hands at every step of the creation. This manual
involvement extends to the cotton substrate for the screenprint, which was dyed by
hand, and the upholstery process itself, which was executed alongside the artist's
mother. This collaborative fabrication serves as a literal and metaphorical passage of
handiwork, suggesting that the experience of being touched, loved, and cared for by her
mother enables the artist’s own capacity for creation today.
The work utilizes a complex symbolic vocabulary to explore themes of both protection
and separation. The pervasive use of blue serves as a dual reference to the life-giving
water of the Atlantic Ocean (the physical barrier that separated the artist from her
mother for seven years) and the Gullah Geechee tradition, which employs the color for
spiritual protection.
Structurally, the chair features a 110-degree angle designed to force the occupant to
“lean back and settle in," as the artist says, thereby simulating the physical experience
of being cradled and cared for. This sense of suspension is further emphasized by the

chair's legs, which are shaped into ovals evoking the shape of a galaxy or celestial body
suggesting that her mother’s orbit constitutes a cosmic touch that comprises the artist's
universe.
The materiality of the piece reinforces its focus on the physical and enduring evidence
of care. The choice of velvet as a primary textile is significant because the fabric "shows
where it's been touched," Hyman says, acting as a tactile record of interaction and
affection.
Central to the composition is a screenprinted image Hyman took of her mother’s hand,
which is spliced into three distinct sections representing the three children the artist’s
mother raised. Drawing conceptual inspiration from bell hooks’s Homeplace: A Site of
Resistance, the artist frames the domestic labor of her mother and Black mothers like
her as a vital antidote to the violence faced by Black communities in America. This labor
is positioned as a radical act that sustains communities and creates new possibilities for
others, transforming the act of rocking into a soothing meditation on how the maternal
grasp provides the freedom and instructive blueprint for the next generation to build robust worlds.