In 2025, I was awarded funding for this project from the Multicultural Center of Marin and the Marin Cultural Association.
My Family is a Forest engaged five Marin families in art-based activities exploring nature, creativity, and the diversity within their family structures. Across five two-hour workshops, participants created over 20 original artworks — drawings, paintings, and collages — that served as both personal reflection and collective storytelling. Five family portraits were then painted and displayed across two exhibitions, which two families attended, deepening the conversation into a wider community context.
The workshops created rare, intentional space for parents and children to step away from busy schedules and drop into creative presence together. Research supports this approach: art therapy provides a safe, non-verbal channel for expressing complex emotions that might otherwise feel overwhelming, while also fostering deeper connections and reducing isolation among participants.
By imagining themselves as elements of a forest — roots, branches, canopy — families found new language for their relationships. Artistic storytelling allows people to become authors of their own narratives, reframing experiences and seeing them from new perspectives. Nature itself was a central, healing presence throughout: research shows that exposure to forest sounds markedly diminishes negative emotions, relaxing participants both physiologically and psychologically. Even imagining a forest — wind, birdsong, wildlife — carried measurable benefit.
Families reflected on how their unique structures mirror ecosystems: diversity as the foundation of abundance, balance, and resilience. These conversations, like the artworks themselves, became seeds of lasting meaning.
