Furniture for Hospital Orchards

2023

Dimensions vary

Hand painted, digitally printed, quilted, and woven fabrics, upholstery materials, aluminum tubing, wood armature, slipcast ceramic and plaster cast fruits gathered from Sonoma State Hospital’s historic orchard, carpet, audio of my partner Hadley humming a soothing and haunting song, tinsel. The privacy curtain is a quilted digital print on linen with a collage of fruits and flowers from Luther Burbank’s photographic records of plants that he deemed “unfit” for reproduction.

Furniture for Hospital Orchards imagines an alternative time and space for queer, trans, disabled, and immigrant people who were committed to Sonoma State Hospital, an institution that implemented forced sterilization from 1909–1979. This series connects to my personal family lineage as well as a collective Bay Area trans/gender variant, queer, mad and neurodiverse ancestry by imagining a world where those forced to labor in state hospitals, specifically in the hospital’s orchard, could redirect their energy towards their own rest, healing, and pleasure. By highlighting parallels between historic horticultural practices and the forced sterilization movement in the Bay Area, the work challenges eugenics informed constructs of what it means to be “normal” and celebrates the variance that eugenics attempts to erase.