A Soft Place to Land was a Gallery 114 exhibit created in collaboration with Portland Textile Month. As one of the participating artists, I also took lead in defining our theme and curating the exhibit.
In a world that often feels like it’s fraying at the edges, A Soft Place to Land creates exactly that - a hand-built refuge that offers moments of calm and quiet.
Nothing here is single-purpose; everything holds more than one function, the way resilience is built from interdependent supports rather than a single strong thread. The effort and the work behind each piece is visible rather than hidden away, showing the marks of making - knots, tension, mended breaks - as a quiet argument for craft as care.
Visitors are invited to sit within the work, becoming another layer in a space built collaboratively by hand, hinting that resilience is never a solitary act but something woven together, thread by thread, person by person.
Resilience is not any single factor.
It’s an intricate weaving created over time, made of community, rest, care, connection, adaptation.
Community has been especially important to building my own resilience - the shared moments of people helping each other, encouraging, giving guidance, cheering each other on, listening when someone is sad or angry. Sometimes community is action, and sometimes it’s knowing that someone else is there with you.
We Are Each Other’s Light in the Darkness is a tapestry created from my community:
Unprocessed wool from the farm of a student who took my weaving workshop at Menucha this summer
Reclaimed wool from a blanket that another student in my class found at a garage sale, and brought to share with the group
Yarn and ribbon reused from ceremony tapestries that I created for a queer wedding event last year
Skeins of wool from my favorite supplier in Canada - they no longer ship to the U.S., and I tell myself to enjoy using the fiber instead of being precious with it
