Four Seasons Tree — Community Craft

Northwest Family Life — 2024

Northwest Family Life is a Seattle-based non-profit focused on supporting victims of domestic violence. In 2024, I partnered with them to bring a community craft experience to their annual fundraiser. The goal was to create an experience that was both meaningful for the participants in the moment, and could also turn into a beautiful piece of art that could live in one of the organization’s locations.

I worked with the Executive Director to come up with a theme: using trees to represent how the four seasons play out in the Pacific Northwest. The imagery of trees is meaningful to the organization, and the staff thought that the imagery of the four seasons (moving through times of drought into seasons of flourishing) could be meaningful to survivors of domestic abuse. Participants at the fundraiser wrote messages of hope and blessing onto paper leaves, and then sprayed the leaves to create a watercolor effect in the colors of each season. 

I assembled the trees and leaves onto a watercolor collage background resulting in a series of 4 trees that contained messages of encouragement. We installed it in the hallway of Penny’s Place, a therapeutic, transitional safe house, where survivors can pass by the messages of encouragement and experience the beauty of art in a time of their life that might feel lacking in those things.