Patricia Fong, a multidisciplinary artist from San Francisco’s Excelsior District, interweaves site-specific installations and performances that remodel collective grief into ritualized acts of remembrance. Drawing from the mourning practices of their neighborhood, Fong combines discovered objects to create poignant, tangled, and placing installations.
They clarify of their artist’s assertion: “I collect discarded supplies from metropolis streets—garments, bedclothes, footwear, packing containers, luggage—and weave them into boundary locations, into timber, into public parks, into my physique and different our bodies.” Fong’s works operate as memorials for lives misplaced to violence, local weather collapse, and late-stage capitalism, inviting us to dwell within the tenuous house of formality and collective testimony. By means of the bodily acts of pushing, pulling, weaving, entangling, and fraying, Fong interlaces contrasting threads that confer visibility to what’s been discarded, made absent, withered, extinguished, and violated.
In Tether/Braid: After Barbara (2024), they use vivid purple yarn and stone to compose an online of prayer proper of their grandmother’s stitching room, 18 months after her demise. As if reminding us that grief rituals are acts of embodied care and compassion, Fong creates reliquaries stuffed with symbolic parts to assist those that expertise grief to cross over the void of loss, absence, and longing.
