TenderHead explores the intricate and shifting landscape of a mind in liminality. Between wakefulness and sleep, hypnagogia becomes a metaphor for both my lived experience as a mixed-race Black woman and my meditative process of working with clay. In a world eager to define me before I can define myself clay becomes my counterspell, a way to reclaim agency, shaping form as I shape my own narrative. The work resists categorization, embracing abstraction as a means of self-definition and inviting others to find ease in ambiguity. Personal and historical research are reimagined within a new context, leaving traces of familiarity while opening psychological pathways to new perspectives through abstraction and sensory illusion. This exhibition invites you into that space, both beautiful and unsettling, where perception bends and meaning is never fixed.