In January 2022, Kate and Steph created a hand-bound artists’ book in the format of a trans mikveh as a ritual bookmaking practice of processing and celebrating the transformative experience of Steph’s top surgery. Mikveh is an ancient Jewish ritual of water immersion, rebirth, and commitment— as queer Jews, we reclaim it as queer self-determination.
In the first few days of recovery following Steph’s top surgery, Kate spray-painted a large technicolor paper mural to celebrate bodily autonomy and revel in Steph’s trans joy. The mural acted as a backdrop for photographing Steph’s newly stitched up chest when they saw it for the first time. Steph then cut the painted paper into page spreads and bound it into a book, weaving a net for its spine.
This experience was deeply profound, exploring the collaborative, transformative act of folding altering moments into pages, and taking the care to collectively link them together with woven waxed thread and a button from the shirt Steph recovered in.
Hevra Kadisha is a Bay Area based, jewish, anti-zionist collective composed of Kate Laster (she/they) and Steph Kudisch (they/them). Hevra Kadisha makes site-specific work that calls for participation through the stewardship of public memory. Their collective practice includes the mediums of sound, printmaking and generative sculpture, through which they position metaphors in order to instigate conversations about human migration and bodily autonomy. In 2023, Laster & Kudisch formed Clear as Schmutz Press & published the Burnout Book, an anthology of 30 artists’ and writers’ works examining labor, caretaking, living, grieving, missing, trying to make & trying to rest.