Attunement Cocoon

What changes when an artwork is not something you stand in front of, but an experience you enter?

I began making Attunement Cocoon with questions about safety, belonging, embodiment, and community. As I worked, another question became increasingly important: What does it mean to curate an experience of safety when no two people enter a space carrying the same body, history, relationships, memories, or expectations?

No person, organization, or community can create a space that everyone will experience as safe. What we can do is attend to what people bring with them, what is already present, what we ourselves contribute, and what happens among us once we gather.

Attunement, as I practice it, is embodied attention. I notice sensations in my body, emotions, impulses, activation, ease. I attend to what I perceive in another person and in the space around us. I notice connection and disconnection, what shifts and what persists.

To practice attunement is to be present to what is happening, including my own responses, before deciding what it means or what should be done about it. I don't require the experience to resolve into one coherent feeling.

I can be furious and grateful.

Something can be falling apart while something else is forming.

I can encounter terrible suffering without overlooking beauty, and beauty without using it to redeem suffering.

My body can prevent me from doing what I planned and tell me what remains possible.

Both can be true.

When the plan meets a life

I began Attunement Cocoon with drawings, measurements, construction plans, and an elaborate textile design. I expected to spend many hours piecing discarded clothing, sarees, scarves, sheers, and other donated fabrics.

Then the conditions in which I was making it changed.

I lost much of my planned construction time. People I depended upon became unable to fulfill commitments. My caregiving responsibilities expanded. My own body became increasingly fatigued and painful. Materials behaved differently than I expected. Techniques that appeared workable in theory proved cumbersome in practice. Some things I planned simply could not be made.

The work changed because the life in which I was making it changed.

The finished Cocoon carries that history. Some seams pucker. Some fabrics wrinkle. Some pieces align and others do not. Elaborately pieced sections coexist with fabric that is suspended, folded, pinned, tied, draped, or simply allowed to fall.

Different parts of the installation bear evidence of different amounts of time, attention, energy, skill, and control.

So do our communities.

So do our bodies.

So do our lives.

Inside out

You encounter Attunement Cocoon from the outside first. Much of its construction reverses traditional sewing conventions. The side ordinarily considered correct or finished faces inward. Seams and construction usually hidden inside a garment are exposed.

I was interested in what happens when those conventions are reversed. What we ordinarily present to the world is sheltered inside. What would usually be held against the body, unseen by others, becomes public.

But the making complicated the idea.

The exterior does not merely represent imperfection. It bears evidence of imperfect making.

These are not faux flaws manufactured to illustrate a concept. They are wrinkles I did not remove, seams that did not behave, experiments that did not work, decisions made under constraints, and solutions invented because earlier solutions became impossible.

We live in cultures that train us to respond to imperfection with severity. We are rewarded for optimization. We identify what is wrong, correct what deviates, replace what fails, and often assign blame when people cannot fulfill what was expected of them.

What happens in your body when you encounter imperfection?

Perhaps your fingers want to straighten something. Your jaw tightens. You hold your breath. Your shoulders rise. You lean away.

Or perhaps you lean closer. Your head tilts. Your gaze softens. Your breath deepens.

Before deciding that something is wrong, beautiful, careless, intriguing, unfinished, or complete, can you notice what your body has already begun to do?

A body in a space

Years ago, before I encountered the language of embodied perception, I wrote that some contemporary poetry made me feel as though I were in a room with disembodied brains glowing in jars on laboratory shelves.

I knew what I was resisting before I had theoretical language for it:

We experience the world through our bodies.

Installation art makes that difficult to forget. Art historian Claire Bishop describes installation as a "situation" into which the viewer enters. Space, sound, light, texture, movement, scale, and other people become materials of the work.

As you approach Attunement Cocoon, where does your body want to go?

What happens as the space narrows?

What changes when you enter?

What do you perceive when you look at fabric? What changes when you look through it?

The Cocoon encloses without sealing. Its walls are porous. Light enters. Other artworks remain visible through translucent fabric. Shadows cross its surfaces. People inside and outside affect one another's experience.

The boundary exists.

And it is permeable.

Presencing what is here

Attunement is sometimes described with words that sound remarkably peaceful: presence, awareness, listening, connection.

My lived practice of attunement is considerably messier.

I made this work while caring for my spouse and navigating caregiving systems that confront us daily with vulnerability, dependence, autonomy, dignity, suffering, money, power, and human limitation.

I am learning that caring for another person does not give me the power, or assign me the duty, to ensure their safety, prevent their suffering, control their experience, or make reality conform to what either of us wishes it were.

My community arts work has taught me something similar.

At Lyricality, we have experimented with emergent ways of creating intercultural, intergenerational, antiracist spaces. Plans meet actual human beings. People become overwhelmed. Circumstances change. Commitments become impossible to fulfill. Beautiful ideas encounter bodies, money, schedules, institutions, histories, conflicts, exhaustion, generosity, creativity, and competing needs.

We practice “no failures, only lessons,” a principle of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. When something does not work, the practice is not to pretend that it did. Nor is it to find someone to blame. We pay attention. What happened? What is it teaching us? What needs attention now? What has become possible that we could not see before?

This practice helped me finish the Cocoon. In practicing attunement, I could remain present to more of what was happening at once.

Things were falling apart.

People were helping me.

I was angry.

I was receiving generosity.

My body hurt.

My body kept giving me information.

I was grieving what I could not make.

Something beautiful was forming.

One reality does not cancel another.

This matters to me because our culture often asks us to make suffering palatable. We beautify grief. We search pain for lessons before we have fully felt it. We turn endurance into inspiration. We hurry toward redemption.

I don't want this work to do that.

I want to make room for grief that remains grief, pain that hurts, anger that tells the truth, beauty that does not compensate for suffering, and joy that does not require suffering to disappear.

I want to practice presencing it all.

There is something here that resonates for me with the story of Saint Benedict seeing all the world gathered into a single ray of light. What moves me now is the all: nothing excluded, nothing required to disappear before the world can be held in a single field of perception. Grief and beauty, suffering and generosity, rupture and connection remain present together.

Hospitality without prescription

Installation art has a long history of trying to "activate" the viewer, transforming the spectator into someone whose presence and actions help constitute the work.

Participation may change the viewer's relationship to the artwork, but it does not erase the power embedded in the invitation itself. Every space establishes possibilities and limits. Every invitation contains assumptions about what an invited person might desire.

I have become less interested in asking:

How can I make people participate?

I am more interested in asking:

How can I step back, make room, and practice hospitality toward bodies whose experiences I cannot know?

During scheduled sound immersions, spoken word, singing bowls, music, silence, vibration, and the presence of a gathered group become additional materials of the installation.

Enclosure may feel comforting or unsettling. Translucency may feel beautiful or exposing. Another person's presence may register as connection or intrusion.

You may notice something happening in your body before you know what to call it.

You may feel uneasy because you feel something.

You are not required to remain, investigate the feeling, or transform it into insight. You may move closer or farther away. You may leave. You may choose not to enter at all. Your agency matters here. 

In my practice of hospitality, I desire to honor your agency, including your choice to decline my invitation.

Now Attunement Cocoon is here

When I enter the completed Cocoon, I experience something I can only describe as an energetic intensity, almost a vortex of love.

I do not assume another body will experience that.

Someone else may experience warmth, curiosity, pleasure, vulnerability, uneasiness, grief, resistance, nothing identifiable at all, or something for which they have no language.

We do not need to agree about what is happening. In practicing attunement, I try to notice what I perceive without requiring another person to perceive the same thing.

I have no desire to tell you what to experience here.

I can tell you that this work did not become what I intended it to become.

Neither did the circumstances in which I made it. Commitments changed, caregiving needs intensified, time contracted, and my own body imposed limits I could not negotiate away. The life in which I had imagined making this work was not the life in which I actually made it.

So I practiced what I had learned: “no failures, only lessons.” I made the next possible choice.

The Cocoon holds traces of all of it: fatigue, limitation, beauty, grief, generosity, wrinkles, translucency, unfinished edges, help from other people, things falling apart, things holding together.

Now the Cocoon is here.

Now you are here.

You are welcome to enter, to observe from outside, or to leave. However you choose to be in relation to this work, I invite you to notice what happens when you meet what is here.