HOT, The Exhibit (2025), Austin TX
HOT, The Exhibit was a month-long multimedia event at the Ground Floor Theatre in Austin, Texas I was honored to participate in. Beginning May 1st, HOT explored peri/menopause via an art exhibit, a play, and conversations with community members and medical experts.
My contributions to this exhibition were created in dialogue with my lifelong friend Shaanti Foerster Abbruzzese, Certified Nurse Midwife and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner at Kaiser Permanente Northwest. The images are inspired by Shaanti’s clinical expertise helping women thrive through and beyond this transition. (Quotes by Shaanti, Images by Heather)
“Hormones are designed to transform and shape us throughout our lifetimes. The roller coaster ascent and descent of hormones in perimenopause is the initiation of our transformation to an era of wisdom in our bodies, souls, and brains—the crone era. The heat and fire of the menopause transition forge new strength and form as the beautiful, wise crone emerges.”
Above, I created a painting using wood burning and ink on one side of a mirror imagining all that has influenced and fed me in my life so far serves as kindling and wood for the fire. Emerging from the heat of the fire, the metal is forged into a sharp arrow.
Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese ceramic repair technique that highlights cracks, celebrating the beauty of imperfection and the history of the object. As I was working on the piece, the mirror fell and broke. Kintsugi was the ideal solution; it fit with my feelings of looking at my body in the mirror as I age and struggling with feeling broken when I could be celebrating these changes.
“The loss of our eggs is the root cause of this estrogen decline. When we are fetuses in our mother’s womb, we have about 6 million oocytes (egg cells) at around 24 weeks gestation which diminish to 1-2 million by birth. At menopause, we have less than 1,000 left.”
“Estrogen is a chemical that travels throughout the body and attaches to receptors in all of our organs to tell them what to do. These receptors act like keys for estrogen to get inside the cells. Cellular processes such as how genes are expressed or how cells grow and develop are influenced by the estrogen chemicals being let in to the cell.”
“Estrogen receptors are everywhere in the body and the rollercoaster of hormonal decline can manifest in wide-ranging symptoms.”
