Gravity Holds Me as You

2022-2023
Abenaki land / Vermont

MFA Thesis project, Transart Institute for Creative Research

Gravity Holds Me As You was a year-long durational practice in which I enacted a daily somatic ritual of lying down on the earth, listening, and rising again. Rooted in grief, belonging, and ecological reciprocity, the work asked how the body might surrender into earth’s gravity as refuge, attuned ecological nervous system, and kin.

From this practice emerged multiple forms: film footage, still photography, and a site-responsive ritual installation shaped by community participation. At once ritual and research, the project unfolded as both embodied inquiry and artistic production, offering a counterpoint to the logic of constant striving and production. It explored what becomes possible when presence, rest, and ecological listening are allowed to stand as outcomes in themselves.

I developed this project amidst historic floods in Vermont, holding space for grief and resilience within a fractured cultural landscape. It invited collective witnessing and the remembrance of the body as earth — not separate, but woven into an ecological nervous system.

The written component of the project was printed on lavender-seeded paper to be planted on land I am stewarding for a future co-housing project and center for somatic ecology. In this way, even its “final” form points toward an iterative, living process that extends beyond the academy and into ongoing ecological relationship.

Tags: Durational performance, Film, Ecological sculpture, Social practice, Somatic ecology, Embodied research, Interdisciplinary research, Scholarship