Benefield: Fiber art piece honors survivors of North Bay fires

Twenty-four artists came together in the wake of the 2017 wildfires to create a piece of art that would embody resilience and teamwork while also acknowledging heartache and loss.

The three-panel piece — a triptych — called “Phoenix Rising: Sonoma Strong” was recently installed in the lobby of the Sonoma County administration building just outside of the supervisors’ chambers.

A small dedication ceremony to officially mark the installation was held Tuesday afternoon.

To see a piece that was put together with the work of 24 individual artists — weavers, knitters, crocheters — from the Redwood Guild of Fiber Arts hung in three-part harmony in the county seat is moving, said Bill Jackson, one of the artists involved in its installation.

The piece shows a phoenix soaring skyward into a starry night, with stands of redwoods in the background.

The mythical bird’s eye is a Santa Rosa Strong lapel pin.

“For me, just seeing it has been emotional. It just draws something out of me,” Jackson said. “It’s just the symbolism of it that gets to me.”

And the symbolism — reflected in its name — is clear. This piece is about resilience, about rising from the ashes, about rebirth in the wake of the 2017 wildfires.

For artist Lynn Noble, the group project, which was launched not long after the Tubbs fire, is both a celebration of community but also deeply personal.

Noble lost her Coffey Park home in the Tubbs fire.

“We were renting on Hopper Avenue. We lost the car and all of our belongings except for a few things we grabbed — and our cat,” she said.

“Surviving something like that, it’s hard to describe going through a harrowing experience,” she said. “But the follow through is that you are alive and there are a lot of reasons to feel grateful.”

And one of those reasons was working with members of the guild on the piece now on display at the county building, she said.

“I have just had this incredible life-changing experience and I know that other people have too and we get together in a room, we are thinking ‘Oh we are alive. We made it through,’” she said. “Cathartic is a really good word to use. Renewal. It became sort of a way to express the fellowship that we have, the support that we felt from our group, the beauty of life that we don’t want to lose sight of.”

The initial idea was to work on the piece as a marker for the guild’s 70th anniversary in Sonoma County.

But the phoenix, dubbed “Phoebe” by her creators because that name means “radiant, shining one,” was getting attention wherever she was displayed.

First of all, she’s plenty big. The three panels stretch from the top of the wall in the lobby while the topmost ends are affixed to the ceiling.

“When we started assembling it, that’s when we needed the studio space to lay it out,” Jackson said.

“To see it completed and hung, it was like ‘Oh wow, this is something,” he said.

When the group displayed Phoebe in all her glory at the Sonoma County Fair this summer, reaction was meaningful.

A petition was started to find a place for the art to hang where the general public could see it.

A deal was hatched for the 130-plus member fiber arts guild to lend the piece to the county for a year, Jackson said.

The artists “started contacting supervisors and other folks at the county and I immediately said ‘Yes, we absolutely want it,’” Supervisor Susan Gorin said.

Gorin, who lost her home in Oakmont in 2017, said the piece is both personally and universally appealing.

“I love the whole concept,” she said. “I look at the piece and it speaks to me, both personally as someone who appreciates crafts and tapestry, but also as a fire survivor. The beauty of it is so appropriate in the context of what we have experienced.”

Under Phoebe is a document acknowledging the individual artists who came together to craft the piece, as well as the guild as a whole.

The piece represents “...people pulling together to build in unity,” and “...in creating this artwork, we hope to enhance the ‘fabric of goodwill’ that exists in our guild and the community.”

For Noble, who lost so much in the fire, what she felt while creating it in community with fellow artists became more important that what the group would do with it once it was finished.

“The vision of having it around was not as important as actually creating it,” she said.

For Noble, the work itself was the important part. It was healing.

“After the Tubbs fire we were thinking ‘Gosh you know there is this kind of impetus to do something as a creative acknowledgment of what a lot of us went through and coming out the other side.’”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.