Heavy Lifting in Fort Bragg

The artists’ book, Heavy Lifting, will be on display in the Pacific Textile Arts Gallery for the month of August, accompanied by a First Friday opening and Saturday morning program.

Heavy Lifting begins with a devastating wildfire and goes on to acknowledge the almost unbearable pace of relentless crises that have unfolded in recent years—covid, climate change, racial injustice, the threat of totalitarianism, immigration crises—and begins to dwell in what might lie beyond these times. Theresa Whitehill’s poems tread a tenuous path at the boundaries between personal and collective reckonings with work that portrays alternating grief, tenderness, defiance, and outrage.

Don’t miss the Heavy Lifting Listening Tour on Saturday, August 5 at 10:00 am. The event is one of a series that aspires to offer opportunities for healing, and dreaming, through dialogue. An introduction to the project opens with a display of the artists’ book, Heavy Lifting and of the experimental film, On Heavy Lifting. This is followed by a conversation between poet Theresa Whitehill  and the audience in which she alternates reading her poems with an invitation for audience members to read their own work or share brief stories in response to the themes and material.

The series of events have been touring the county since February and occur monthly in communities impacted by the wildfires throughout northern California in 2023 and into 2024.