Bery Wilson, Sculptress. That’s what it says on my business card. These days every actress wants to be called an actor, every waitress wants to be a waiter. But I’m a woman and I want every last person who sees my work to know it. My artist friends scoff when I show them my card. They think it’s vulgar, like I’m an electrician or an accountant hocking my services. But I’m making a living doing what I love, and I want the world to know that, too.

In my twenties, when I was new to New York, my love affair with the city just beginning, I salvaged my materials from its streets: twisted bike rims, concrete, pigeon feathers, lots of metal. My latest pieces are different. In this place of my adulthood, I resurrect the spaces of my youth.

Rubbish Day went up last year in a pocket park in the West Village. If you’re not from where I’m from, you’d see it and think it was just a sculpture made of castaway items, but anyone from home would see the bottle of Maggi and the box of Sazón Goya, the Ivory soap and Crix crackers wrappers, the bottles of D&G pineapple soda and Vita Malt and the canister of Nestlé Klim and know it was a love letter.

School Girls was installed in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Building in Harlem a few years ago. A circle of straw-and-plaster girls with painted-on skirts and blouses, maroon and pink. On the opposite edge of the plaza there was another girl, alone, looking back at the others and flaying them with her eyes. The piece was up November through March. The decay of the materials over the course of the winter was part of the project from its inception. I used to ride up there to see how people interacted with my work. Hardly anybody noticed the lone girl. I would watch her as if held there by something. Watch the snow settle on her shoulders, pigeons peck at her straw, sleet lash her wide-open eyes. I wanted to take her home and make her cinnamon tea and tell her, Just you wait.

Faraway Woman will be my next project, on Governors Island. I’ve only done sketches so far, but I know she will be larger than life. A woman twelve feet high with locks of black hair six feet long and bright white haunches thick as tree trunks. Hooves for feet. I want people to fall in love with her. I want her to give them nightmares.

When that girl died on Faraway, I knew it was the woman who took her. You might expect me to believe it was Gogo Richardson, on account of the afternoon he punched me so hard my legs flew out from under me. But that afternoon wasn’t what I thought about when I heard that he and Edwin had been taken into custody. Instead, I thought of a morning many years earlier, the first day of second grade, when Gogo’s terrible stutter almost caused him to wet himself in front of the entire class. I felt such rage at him then. Rage for allowing something so humiliating to happen to himself. Rage that he couldn’t just fit in. I know, I know. Irony is a live wire. It seems to me now that for years of my life, rage is all I was. It lived in my skin and crackled in my teeth. I would have followed it anywhere.