Between January and November 2024, seven Kinship community members gathered thirteen times to ‘reimagine’ loss and grief. Whether intentional or in our subconscious, we influenced one another in an unspoken call and response: One person’s vulnerability inviting others to let go; another person’s way of seeing inspiring new perspectives. Honestly and bravely we kept messing around in our collective ‘sandbox,’ letting the grit and grime that is loss and grief transform within, between and among us.

We’ve come together over the past year to explore embodied photographic practices that are grounded in the senses, shared conversations between bodies, noticed and deepened the relationships that connect all bodies. Along the way, we’ve been bringing our own bodies to photography, sharing personal and collective grief through image making, documenting natural disasters as we live through them, expressing the ways our bodies are intimately entwined with each other’s and the earth body we live in.

From April to May 2024, Kinship community members responded to three prompts adapted from Joanna Macy and Molly Brown’s book Coming Back to Life and recently featured on We Are The Great Turning podcast. These are our responses.

Where do our bodies end and other bodies begin? How does our understanding of the edges of our being influence us? For six weeks, practice group participants of A Complex Definition of a Body met and worked in a diverse range of photographic techniques to play with the complexity of defining what a body is.