Touching Grass: reimagining the commons
Glassell Gallery, 2026
Focusing on the feelings of love, care, and peace that I feel while outdoors or surrounded by loved ones, my depictions of community reimagine togetherness and embrace re-enchantment with Mother Earth.
Through an ecofeminist and animist lens, I explore relationality between humans, plants, and animals using mystical symbolism, mythology, and intuitive mark-making. My paintings reimagine the commons, acting as a form of worldbuilding through visual storytelling. In these reimaginings, the commons is not only shared land, but holds multiplicities—collective experiences of creation, being, and destruction; joy, hope, and grief.
“All perception is a commons: a dance of interdependency with the world.”
—Andreas Weber
While the exhibition was up, I hosted two nights of social art gatherings that were open invite, but limited to ten people to keep it intimate. I asked everyone to dress up like their favorite flora or fauna. It was potluck-style and centered around sharing a meal at a beautifully set table. I traded art with @mistandmallow for a locally grown bouquet, and invited flutist Estella Vu to join us in feasting after playing live music to greet the guests. There was a box to keep smartphones. We held hands and prayed and I recited a manifesto before we ate. After dinner, I gave readings from my Earth Magic oracle deck.
These happenings transform the labor of care and hosting, often dismissed as “women’s work” into a site of radical hospitality and resistance to individualist culture and the loneliness epidemic. Each gathering becomes a living artwork: an ephemeral collective experience built through the unique energies and conversation of the evening. I pay close attention to aesthetic and sensory detail: foraging bouquets, lighting candles, cooking food you can smell, decorating with attention to color palette and theme. I focus on the sensual to slow us down and bring everyone into our shared present moment.
The title of these performances, "Hosting is the Highest Form of Art", references Tom Marioni’s famous series of performances from the 1970’s titled "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art," a social art piece where the artist had people over to his San Francisco studio to drink beer every week for 45 years. I see both his and my own performance work as challenging the boundaries of traditional art-making by using everyday life as the medium.