Threads

Reflection on the Making of Threads

Threads is an exploration of grief and fragility through an artistic practice rooted in ritual, materiality, and collective process. This project began with the dismantling of my mother’s church dress — an intimate act of deconstruction that set the foundation for a contemplative journey through textile, sound, and somatic practice. Over time, the fabric became a conduit for both personal and shared narratives, interwoven with practices of slowness, softness, and surrender.

At the heart of Threads is a series of interventions, performances, and collaborations, each contributing to an evolving dialogue on grief. The Intervention of Softness performance and album introduced the grief jar — an object inspired by Camille Barton’s Tending Grief and Martin Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust. This jar, first brought into ritual space in the city-center of Nuremberg, became an instrument of quiet process, a tactile vessel for holding loss. The grief jar was also incorporated into a ceremony co-hosted with Rosalind Holgate-Smith, where crystal bowls, chimes, and voice activated sound as a means of moving energy and entering into a process of soft compassion.

The film component of Threads emerged through collaboration with Sarah Foss and Natascha Schoenaich, weaving together shared stories of womanhood, memory, and lineage. This process was deeply psychomagical — an intuitive unfolding where personal histories and collective consciousness intertwined. The resulting visual language centers on the fabric of my mother’s dress, draped over bodies, resting, embodying the complexity of grief as something one can often only breathe through. The final film is accompanied by layered sound: the resonance of crystal bowls and the rustling of fabric and paper within the grief jar.

Material exploration played a crucial role in the project’s evolution. Found objects — broken glass, worn textiles, discarded fragments, shells and stones — became poetic markers of memory. Inspired by the idea that grief is held in the most mundane of things, the idea of sculpting suspended objects emerged, inspired by Occupations of Uninhabited Space from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. This would lay the foundation for the floating altar reliquary to come later.

The soundscape, integral to Threads, mirrors the project’s ethos of accumulation and process. Fragments of glass breaking and fusing together, cyclial composition and decomposition, whispered voiceovers recounting reverence, memory, and loss — all elements that invite the listener into a space of resonance and contemplation. Inspired by the concept of ‘restful doing,’ the sonic work resists linear progression, favoring an intuitive unfolding.

Threads is not just an individual exploration but a collective experience. The process underscored the importance of approaching uncertainty with curiosity, allowing the unknown to shape the work organically. By inviting others into the construction and deconstruction of the fabric, the project embraces a shared vulnerability. The act of making has been as much about care, authenticity, and restfulness as it has been about creation and persisting aliveness within a landscape of grief. It raises fundamental questions: How can artistic practice serve as both personal catharsis and communal offering? How might art be an act of soft anarchy, unraveling conditioned modes of being and reweaving them into something more attuned to the rhythms of care and connection?

Threads remains an ongoing inquiry, an ever-growing archive of presence, impermanence, and renewal. Through textile, sound, and ritual, it seeks to hold space for grief — not as something to resolve, but as something to be honored, carried, and shared.

The film version of Threads premiered at HAZE Gallery in Berlin in May-June 2025. It has since received an Honorable Mention at the European International Film Awards.