Patricia Fong’s
Tether/Braid: After Barbara

Patricia Fong, a multidisciplinary artist from San Francisco’s Excelsior District, interweaves site-specific installations and performances that transform collective grief into ritualized acts of remembrance. Drawing from the mourning practices of their community, Fong combines found objects to create poignant, tangled, and striking installations.

They explain in their artist’s statement: “I gather discarded materials from city streets—clothes, bedclothes, shoes, boxes, bags—and weave them into boundary places, into trees, into public parks, into my body and other bodies.” Fong’s works function as memorials for lives lost to violence, climate collapse, and late-stage capitalism, inviting us to dwell in the tenuous space of ritual and collective testimony. Through the physical acts of pushing, pulling, weaving, entangling, and fraying, Fong interlaces contrasting threads that confer visibility to what’s been discarded, made absent, withered, extinguished, and violated.

In Tether/Braid: After Barbara (2024), they use vivid red yarn and stone to compose a web of prayer right in their grandmother’s sewing room, 18 months after her death. As though reminding us that grief rituals are acts of embodied care and compassion, Fong creates reliquaries full of symbolic elements to help those who experience grief to cross over the void of loss, absence, and longing.