Peace be to this House

Peace be to this House, 2024
For Housing California’s Annual Conference, Long Beach Convention Center, Long Beach, CA [View installation process]
Ink and yarn on cheesecloth; living plants; glass plates and yarn on wooden table

Dedicated to the ones who seek the peace within

This work of art was created with a hope for a sustaining peace within our homes that can then generate beyond the walls and out into a world that desperate needs it.

Peace be to this House calls for collective action, inviting guests to each contribute a single word that encapsulates their personal feelings and/or memories associated with the ideal home. With the hand-stitched, textual contributions of each unique hand, the hopes for our dwelling places take on tactile form as words of refuge, comfort, and good will dapple the walls.

The materials used in this piece are those that might be found in the home, perhaps having been traditionally used for generations. Hand-stitching is incorporated as a patient act of mending and healing, while cheesecloth is commonly used to provide nourishment, symbolizing the ways that love that can be expressed through the generous act of hospitality. 

While the translucency of the cloth allows light to penetrate all corners of the home, from both within and without, a dove hovers overhead as a bearer of an enduring peace that covers the families and the children who dwell therein. The home teams with life, grounded upon a foundation of growth as living plants populate the interior. It is washed with California’s state colors—blue, which represents our brilliant blue skies, and gold that signifies the California gold rush, which attracted thousands, contributing to the diversity of our culturally rich state. 

Guests are invited to consider the elements, feelings, and memories associated with the ideal home, and then to encapsulate these notions into one single word, which is then hand-stitched directly upon the home. As the home travels from city to city, it will continue gathering the words that will strengthen its structure, both figuratively and physically.

Peace be to this House serves as a gentle, participatory, and communal call for peace. It also stands as a consistent prayer for those who are searching for belonging, the ones who hope to be reunited with their families, and the ones who hope to stay with their families.

And whatsoever house ye enter, first say ‘Peace be to this house’.   - Luke 10:5

Sowers of Peace workshop at Stanford University. Embroidering over 50 words upon Peace be to this House was incredibly meditative and did indeed pull me further into a state of peace. I wanted to share this process with others, and had an opportunity to do so with a group of students whose lives, studies, ambitions, and witnessing of a hostile world had pressed upon them far too much anxiety. While some of us spoke softly about the important things in life, most of us sat in silence, stitching words of beauty and love and peace upon their swaths of cheesecloth. This was an active call for peace, also to be instilled into our hearts as we witness wars all around us.

They completed this prompt with their chosen words:

In order to be a more effective peacemaker, I will make a more concerted effort to cultivate more _________________ in my life and in the lives of others.