On Being A Porous Boundary

Join Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative in person at the opening reception for On Being a Porous Boundary. Reception will be followed by facilitated reflective writing and discussion. (Narrative Medicine Workshop participants do not need to arrive promptly at 4:00, but do allow enough time to be with the artwork before the workshop begins at 6:00).
On Being a Porous Boundary features immersive paintings, bodily ceramic sculpture, and monumental paper sculpture by Catherine Fairbanks, and intimate poetry by Catherine Barnett, which has been hand-drawn for the exhibition by Nuria Kiesebrink-Pareick. We construct and reconstruct boundaries in order to protect ourselves, to relate to others, to move into and through the world, and for the world to move around and through us. We are, ourselves, volumes of porous boundaries. What does care look like in this context? How do we care for ourselves, for those in our immediate orbit, for strangers? How and when might we choose to hold strangers closely? What amount of fierceness or tenderness is necessary? What seeps through?
Featured artists: Catherine Fairbanks uses empathy as a foundational structure to bridge her dual practices as an artist and a nurse. In both roles, she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein, for whom empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference in the other. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality and liberation. Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf) and Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times "Best Poetry of 2018" selection). She received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, 615 South Palatine Hill Road, Portland, United States