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"What kind of art do you make?"

I never know how to answer this question. How do you describe a combination of festival jewelry, stuff I used in dreams, Christmas ornaments, and translucent glowing brook trout? The jewelry, available in the shop, is a collection of talismans of the forest’s elegant strength. Each piece is shaped by hand with an organic irregularity. 

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Lately I have been making objects for friends in major life transitions. A beaded collar made with the feathers of a starling killed by an owl. A staff for a couple getting married. 

 

I also make event-based installation pieces. I make places - a setting in which an experience happens. These pieces are interactive, community-building works that invite participants to let go of the rigid social scripts of accrued interpersonal habits in order to open their hearts to more authentic connections with our human, plant, and animal relations. Think of it is a reset on the default neural networks of our social norms. 

 

In the meantime, if you keep getting pestered by an object in a dream and you want to make it material but don't know how, I am definitely the person who can help you with that. That's how I learned to make maracas out of trash. Let's talk. 

Tender Fire Studio is part concept, part my tiny basement apartment full of art supplies and very little furniture, and part shared workshop. I work, play, and love on land that was stolen from the Pocumtuc people, settled by colonizers, and continues to be sold for profit in the speculative real estate market for the enrichment and comfort of the owning class. Decolonizing my practice is an ongoing study of how I can be in right relationship to the land, animals, and plants of this place while embracing and acknowledging the often-scary precarity and vulnerability of a life given to the pursuit of soul and the sacred rather than the settler concepts of security and safety. I give thanks and praise to the rivers that form this Connecticut River valley, to these sand hills and the ants that dwell here and find my kitchen window so inviting, to the many birds and their dawn hymns, and to the forests: o the trees, the ferns, the damp stones and the deep deep woods, you are the mercy of the sacred in cellulose flesh.


Tender Fire Studio  @tenderfirestudio
tenderfirestudio@gmail.com
PO BOX 9359, North Amherst, MA 01059

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