Beauty Comes of All Things Dedication

Last week I had the honor to dedicate this art piece! Thank you @arts4mc for the generous grant which made this possible. Thank you Elizabeth H., Kristin and team for seeing this hung in its new home in the @montagehealth Westland House dining room, where hospice patients and their families spend time together, and for hosting such a lovely event! I so appreciated the opportunity to share the story behind this work, and to sing "Unfurl", the end-of-life song/poem I wrote to go with it. How great to follow that with another song with Threshold Choir of PG - Susie and Jill have been singing sweetly at bedsides for many years here. I wanted to create a piece that would help bring comfort to threshold times. Ferns have proliferated on Earth for ~400 million years, and embody much ancient grace and wisdom. They lend reassurance in the cyclical nature of all existence. This textile triptych shows the Western sword fern in three stages: upward thriving towards the sun | furling inwards as rain brings fronds down in slow return to source | and regeneration/rebirth of spiraling fiddleheads. I created these pieces through a Japanese stencil/resist process called katazome, in which rice paste resist is applied through stencils to keep the linen from uptaking dye in the indigo bath. Pre-dying with pomegranate rind renders the indigo more teal. We are holding a two-sided “thresholder” blanket, which I was able to donate for hospice patients . One side honors life and death, the other embodies transcendence. It can be used ceremonially to mark the moment of death and the journey that begins from there. I call this piece “Beauty Comes of All Things” - inspired by a near death experience story. Thanks to all my friends and @iminbliss for much support along the way. And for Elizabeth B. And Hospice of the Central Coast for supporting an amazing volunteer experience that helped inform the work. And for @montereycountyweekly for the nice article last week! I hope this work helps bring peace and courage to many.