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The Portal

The Portal (2023) was an installation at Scarboro Bowl that created a threshold between the inhumane customs of daily life and the more magical, connected, and relaxed ways of being together at the festival. In its seventh year, Scarboro intentionally expanded well beyond the social networks of the organizers, so setting the tone for newcomers was important. The Portal experience invited festivalgoers to reflect on three questions as they moved through the series of dioramas and strange vignettes: 

  • What do you need to release in order to be fully present to joy here?

  • What gratitude fills your heart?

  • What blessings do you bring to share with others here?

​Virtually all of the components of The Portal were composed of found or discarded objects. These came from two friends' emotionally-loaded cleanouts after life transitions, so The Portal also served as a transition place for them to let go of objects that carried heavy symbolic weight. ​

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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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