Alyssa Ackerman

Altars of the Everyday: A Grief Mapping Through Found and Foraged Materials As a grief guide and ritualist devoted to cultivating community healing and creating a grief literate culture, I propose the offering of a series of portable altars honoring the six gates of grief (or kinds of grief including: 1. everything I love I will lose. 2. the parts of me that have not known love. 3. the sorrows of the world. 4. what i expected and did not receive. 5. ancestral grief. 6. the harm i have caused). These altars will be lovingly constructed using found and foraged materials from in and around Astoria. With a commitment to sustainability and place-based practice, I will work exclusively with natural elements (driftwood, moss, rusted nails, river stones, lichen, feathers) and repurposed items discovered in local thrift shops. Each altar will become a tactile shrine—offering the grief of our lives, our lineages, our land, and our mistakes a place to rest, be known, and honored. This project is not only a visual expression and remembrance practice of grieving, but a ritual act of re-enchantment, transforming forgotten objects and discarded things into sacred spaces. Each altar will be accompanied by a written work as well as a contemplation/invitation for the viewer. As a whole, the work becomes a traveling landscape of sorrow and reverence, inviting others into a deeper relationship with personal and collective grief. I believe grief is not a problem to be solved but a territory to be tended, and this residency would offer a fertile container to create and share a map of that tending. Token: Zine - Let's Bring Grief Home (I would like to deliver or ship you an altar when it is complete