This installation and ceremony is a response to the experience of witnessing and grieving the loss of my family’s home due to the Mountain Fire on November 6th, 2024. The ceremony invites participants to reflect on how climate change has impacted their lives as individuals and as a collective. As we share these moments, we consider how we can learn, love, and honor the land by practicing reciprocity, reflection, and care. While acknowledging the devastation that fire has caused, this piece explores the sanctity of fire and challenges our separation from it; as it is our estrangement from fire and the erasure of Indigenous practices of controlled burning that has led us to such vast destruction.
Gently hanging from the ceiling and mounted on walls are textiles with various plants sewn into them. Imbuing plants into textiles reflects my experience of climate grief; an attempt to preserve the natural world while acknowledging the inevitability of its decay. Draped across the ceiling, gauzy fabric and a garland of aloe hung above the heads of the participants. A poem, sewn into a large, circular fabric lay below. Rings of eucalyptus, soil, shells, rotting lemons, oranges, pomegranates, milkweed pods, and candles surrounded it.
To begin the ritual, each participant was prompted to think about something they loved that they lost as they placed a pinch of salt into a basin. The salt served as a container for these tender memories and cleansed the water used for the performance. Dissolvable fabric embroidered with hundreds of stitches in red, orange, and yellow thread surrounding a ring of milkweed seeds was passed around the circle. Symbolic of life cycles, inspired by fire, and reminiscent of the warmth of my family’s home, the threads were arranged in water-soluble fabric.
As I knelt in the center of the circle and poured water over the fabric, the threads were released as it dissolved. Without the structure of the fabric, the threads and seeds became a heap at the bottom of the bowl, an homage to the life that persists even in the face of destruction. The thread holds the memory of the fabric, and the milkweed seeds wait to find their way back to the soil.
An opposite action, a destruction, a return.
The water, contaminated. The threads, matted. The fabric, disintegrated. The seeds, latent.
A ritual of irreversible processes. An act of acceptance, an effort to rebuild a relationship with the earth and the processes that destroy it. How can we accept our reality if we can’t coexist with the processes that change it? How can we grieve what we’ve lost, and harness our love for healing?
untitled (playing), 2025
twigs and branches
i buried my secrets in the santa monica mountains
this body was born from calcareous sandy loam and fine sandy clay loam, ancient sea creatures, the silver leaves of sage and the rusted buds of buckwheat.
this body was born from a land that crackles and burns in fall months and is covered by soft green grasses by march.
i buried my secrets there,
where the sea salts the air and tickles the monarchs. (it cleanses).
there, where i rub California sagebrush between my wrists and under my jaw, because it smells good but also so i can remember the places i’ve walked through.
the soil taught me pressure, particle, history, body, breath, water. it showed me what crumbles from the corners of our mouths when we let our faces rest in the heat of the sun.
the wisdom i know from these mountains is told in the silence of smoke: from the mouth of the fire that burns and builds, releases seed and spore, curls the edges of sycamore leaves and smolders the bodies of oak trees, the smoke whispers back the secrets we choose to forget but still know too well.
fire humbles. it quietly devastates, and from it emerges a beauty that resembles the mystery of a newborn child.
there is a stillness in the air when the fires stop. sometimes this stillness can feel apocalyptic; haunting. the ash of lemonade berry bushes, yarrow, matilija poppies, and coyote mint pulls tears from our eyes. the soil reveals the truth in its resilience when the storms come in february. but if there’s one thing that the fires, that the calcareous sandy loam, that the sage and buckwheat and sycamore and oak have taught me is - life is in constant motion- some things have to die to be alive, and even if the fire reaches the tender heart of an oak tree, new life will always find its way between the cracks.
i buried my secrets here because this land knows its own wisdom. it cleanses itself. it burns and breathes. there is trust in the ancient, the beloved, the sacred, the silver, sienna and viridis.
