THE WARP & THE WEFT
This body of work is a photographic meditation on family, transition, and grief. The project unfolds through the structure of warp and weft: two sets of threads in woven fabric, creating its structure. Images move between domestic space, family ritual, loss, and everyday life.
Created over the last few years during growth, transition, and grief. Transition and pregnancy unfold nonlinearly—a practice of molting, revisiting, and re-inhabiting the self, rather than becoming an idealized one.
Within this time, grief and new life arrive together. The death of our cat, my best friend occurred only minutes before the birth of our child; loss and beginning was entangled and continue to coexist. Parenthood appears not as a milestone but as matrescence — an ongoing process of becoming a mother, where holding and letting go are learned simultaneously.
During maternity leave, the loss of my job marked not only the loss of work, but the loss of a community I helped build. In the aftermath, we began the slow work of rebuilding ourselves and our lives. We got kittens. Norah grew. We found new friends and an artistic community rooted in presence. Light returned—until grief took us again, and again.
Photography functions here not as documentation or resolution, but as an act of care and a desire to understand. Though nothing in these images asks to be understood; they just ask to be witnessed. Rather than preserving memory as fact, this work holds states of being — gestures, atmospheres, absences, feeling and endurance. Family emerges as a constellation — biological, chosen, and continually re-formed — shaped by love, strain, loss, and persistence. The record remains intentionally unfinished, acknowledging that becoming does not replace what was lost, but grows alongside it.
This work is ultimately about learning how to stay — with one another, with grief, with change, and with lives that continue to unfold without neat conclusions.
We are still here.
And this is how we stayed.
Sarah Weiss is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
