Mother Nurture is a social sculpture that centers process and place, and invites community members to ferment, forage, grow, and dye organic materials (such as kombucha leather, mushrooms, seaweed, silk, wool, and more). We slowly co-create a living portal-chrysalis-shrine to collectively celebrate and grieve, remember and forget. The gallery space and the community of growers, foragers, artists, and social sculpture makers, become part of a pulsing distributed network of queer mothering that brings the sculpture into being through workshops, foraging trips, participatory sculpture-building, ritual performances and meditations, storytelling, and other activities.
While previous incarnations of this project sought to shine a light on the expansive capacity of mothering (as a verb that can nurture healing, transformation, remediation, and regeneration), in this iteration we invite reflection on how to weather loss and grief. How do we reconcile the enormous scale of loss and suffering at the edge of the sixth extinction? How do we acknowledge and collectively mourn the grief that comes from this realization? How do we learn to mother, care for and depend on each other, through such unsettling times? How do we restore the cycles of death to their rightful place within the cycles of life?
We invite you to reflect with us and become part of our mycelial network by participating in the following on-site and off-site activities; dates TBA shortly!
Nov: Kombucha Leather and Organic Dyes Workshops
Dec: Social Sculpture Activation, Grieving Circle, and More
Ongoing: Gallery Visits, to View Process-at-Rest, and Other Participatory Activities
The Arts, Cultures, and Designs of Remediation Cluster is a collective of UC Davis faculty and students (in environmental design, soil sciences, theater and dance, performance studies, and cultural studies), and community members from Yolo County. Mother Nurture was the culmination of a two-year residency that involved numerous activities engaging remediation through the interdisciplinary lens of the arts, sciences, and the humanities. The social sculpture has been exhibited previously at the International House and St. Martin’s Church in Davis, CA, and the Feminist Research Institute on the UC Davis campus. The Davis Cluster Network included: Stephanie Maroney, Caro Novella, Anuj Vaidya, Willa Smart, Margaret Kemp, Kate Scow, Radomir Schmidt, Elizabeth Marley, Gino Forlin, NJ Mvondo, Francesca Wright, Ann Liu, Juliette Beck, Pamela Dolan, Alessa Johns, Elise Keddie.
Sculpture Design/Engineering Lead: Elizabeth Marley. Soundscape by Kevin Dockery.
Project Leads @ Pro Arts: Elizabeth Marley, Stephanie Maroney, Caro Novella, Anuj Vaidya