A collaboration between ShapeShifter Art School & Gallery and Fierce Mamas.

ShapeShifter believes that art belongs to everyone and that creative practice can be a powerful tool for exploration, connection, and lifelong learning. Fierce Mamas is a caregiver-led organization working at the intersections of disability, mental health, addiction, chronic illness, grief, and complex systems of care. Together, we share a belief that creativity can help make visible experiences that are often difficult to name, explain, or understand.

What happens when caregivers come together to make meaning from the materials, memories, and stories that shape our lives?

Gather is an ongoing series of creative gatherings for caregivers navigating disability, illness, mental health challenges, addiction, aging, grief, recovery, and other experiences of long-term care.

Working individually and collaboratively, participants will explore caregiving through a variety of creative processes. Some gatherings may incorporate drawing, writing, collage, textiles, sculpture, or found objects. Others may begin with stories, conversations, questions, or the artifacts that accumulate around care. Together, we'll investigate how personal experiences become collective narratives and how creativity can help us better understand the systems, relationships, and responsibilities that shape our lives.

Some gatherings may return to the same project month after month. Others may begin with a story, a question, a photograph, a piece of paperwork, or an object that has followed someone home from a hospital room and never quite found its way out again.

Caregiving leaves traces.

A closet full of supplies. A folder of records. A stack of forms. Equipment that no longer serves its original purpose. Objects that carry memories, frustrations, fears, victories, and responsibilities that can be difficult to explain to people who haven't lived them.

Gather offers space to bring those traces into the room with people who understand their weight, recognize their significance, and don't require a translation. People who already know that a three-letter acronym can derail an entire afternoon and that a single piece of paperwork can become a recurring character in a family's life story.

No artistic experience is necessary. Only curiosity.

Gather is open to caregivers of all kinds, including parents, grandparents, siblings, partners, adult children, chosen family, and anyone who has spent time helping another person navigate illness, disability, recovery, aging, crisis, or everyday life.

Registration is offered on a pay-what-you-can basis. Contributions help support materials, the use of the space, and compensation for artists and facilitators while keeping participation accessible.

Come bring what caregiving has left behind. We’ll figure out what to make of it together.