Through its life “The Endeavor” became a vehicle for examining sweeping experiences around labor, failure, death, violence, care, community, rest, and love. This work attempted to imagine a kind of space where social and political norms are turned on end even as they are illuminated.

The Endeavor is an 85 foot-long figurative soft sculpture made of recycled, dyed military parachutes and filled with poly-fiber fill. She is what I call a Tired Body. Tired Bodies are large-human-scale soft sculptures. They are ways to talk about gender norms, sexuality, body image, ableism, and motherhood. Created during the pandemic, The Endeavor was to be born into a public space through a community processional and performance of birth. She was meant to reside on the Atlanta Beltline for six weeks and subsequent birthing performances of her children were scheduled to take place.

A community of volunteer doulas and I carried The Endeavor’s body along a mile of the Beltline. Together, we brought her to life as a gift to others, and an invitation to rest. She was a monument to love and care.

After only a few days at her site, The Endeavor was destroyed. I had arranged volunteers to help care for her over the course of six weeks since we anticipated some damage due to the nature of her material; however, I never anticipated the speed and degree of violence she would endure, particularly at night when she was most vulnerable.

After that, another team of community volunteers rescued her remains, as well as the smaller Tired Bodies that would have been her children. I reworked the subsequent performances into funeral processions and celebrations of her life, and together The Endeavor and I took up the spaces that she had lived in, proclaiming loudly in the joy and care that had been present, acknowledging the violence, and failure, and through our labor finding a place of rest together. These processions included transporting the remains of the Endeavor along the Beltline, reading texts that informed her creation to the public, movement in response to the violence and grief, and invitations to rest together with the public in durational performances that lasted 3–5 hours.