Tender Material, a two-person exhibition featuring the multidisciplinary practices of Kim Garcia and Frannie Hemmelgarn, is an exploration of memory, grief, and repair through sculpture, works on paper, and mixed-media installation. The exhibition brings together resin, paper, and personal objects transformed into fragile yet enduring forms that reconcile loss, express longing, and attempt to remember, understand, and mend complicated relationships.

The artists begin with precious matter: family photographs both old and recent, daily scribbles, schedules, to-do lists, and fragments of poetry. Each carries the weight of their fathers’ lives: one father grasping for what drifts away, the other suddenly gone.

Garcia and Hemmelgarn treat these found and researched remnants as ingredients, subjecting them to acts of tracing and retracing, pressing and submerging, tearing, binding, weaving, and reweaving. Through these gestures, material becomes feeling; the past merges with the present.

Garcia’s resin works are hazy, mirroring “the experience of reaching for memories that are slipping away, like watching my father search for what he can no longer fully hold.” Hemmelgarn’s paper works convey fragility, care, and repair. Words peek out from torn edges, and rips are sewn back together. “The process of making these works was a reminder to make my grief active, a way to take my dad along for a ride, even in his death.”

Material objects like grids, frames, chicken wire, stucco trim, and resin, designed to contain, support, archive, and protect, become necessary frameworks. These structures act as safety nets that allow the artists to approach the unknown without being consumed by it. Both Garcia and Hemmelgarn have created their own worlds within which they do the work of engaging in grief and remembering. Tender Material reveals how the sturdy can hold the tender, and how ritual transforms remnants into poetic gestures of understanding and care.