Exquisite Refuge emerged from a week-long residency at the Jackson Hole Art Association in February 2025, where walking was both catalyst and connective tissue.

As Visiting Artist, I led a group of local artists to consider how movement across land, whether through wilderness, a studio, or the shifting social terrain of the region, shapes our understanding. Jackson Hole’s history and present moment hold a profound tension: the valley promoted for more than a century as a sanctuary for wildlife, while contemporary workers, especially Central American migrant and immigrant laborers, seek sanctuary from the growing threats of U.S. immigration enforcement. These contrasts of privilege, access, refuge, and precarity pulsed beneath our project’s evolution as we also made space for our own differences and preferences as artists.

Each day began with walking. Sometimes we stepped into planned public spaces or recreational trails; other times we found ourselves crossing the edges of wilderness, where snow revealed the subtle patterns of animal life and wind-shaped ground. These shared movements deepened our awareness of who the land is shaped for, who is welcomed, and who remains unseen. The immense beauty of the Tetons sat beside the invisible reality of low-wage workers supporting a wealthy resort economy. Walking made that duality impossible to ignore.

In the studio, we translated these embodied impressions into collective making. Inspired by Surrealist exquisite corpse practices, we welcomed disjunction, surprise, and juxtaposition…inviting each artist to add gestures without knowing fully how the piece would unfold. This process mirrored our walks: no single author, no linear path, no one perspective that could contain the full experience. Physical movement remained central; we worked on the floor, on long rolls of paper, in shifting constellations that echoed trails and crossings.

By mid-week, we transformed a shared common space into what became Exquisite Refuge: a temporary sanctuary shaped by suspended paper forms, soft thresholds, and walkable compositions that altered the rigid geometry of the building. The installation invited people to slow down, bend, duck, and meander, noticing texture, fragility, and the possibility of gentler spaces within institutional walls. We watched as both documented and undocumented students and workers began using the space for rest between classes or shifts. The installation became refuge not only in idea, but in practice.

Parallel to the studio work, I created several snow cultivators, walking drawings inscribed into fresh winter fields. Most were solitary meditations; others were made with participants who learned to read the winter surface as a responsive collaborator. The most symbolically charged was the cultivator along the frozen banks of the Snake River. There, the contrast between privileged outdoor recreation and the heavy industry of bridge-building converged with my steps on ice and packed snow. Walking “on the water” became a metaphor for impossible crossings…echoing the journeys of people whose paths into safety are far more dangerous and uncertain than mine.

Exquisite Refuge ultimately wove together the region’s complex relationships to refuge, belonging, and movement. Through walking, collective making, and site-responsive installation, we investigated how sanctuary is shaped: who it protects, who it excludes, and how art can briefly open a softer passage between those worlds.