Q & A with Hold Us Tight artist Moonbeam Gardebring

My name is Moonbeam Gardebring. I grew up in South Minneapolis, and I am a casket weaver. 

How did you become a casket weaver? 

By spending a lot of time getting close to dying. 

I have had like a really rare, life-threatening chronic illness since I was 15 that impacts my airways. So you’ll notice I breath really loudly and differently because my airway is really small. And the last like 7 years have gotten worse and worse and worse, and it turns out now I have more diseases. And in that time I could feel in my body that my life was draining and there wasn’t a lot left, and I didn’t know how to tell people. For like a year and a half I was just really sick. All the medical labs showed nothing special was happening at all. But I could feel, I could hardly move, I could hardly think, hardly blink, even. And I didn’t know like how to interrupt other people’s business as usual to say like, I feel this in my body. And what it’s like to live- I think was like a year and a half before I could say it- like it hit me and I could tell people out loud.

I wrote a letter to my closest friends to say “Will you do this with me?”, like here’s how I am: I’m close to dying, I don’t expect to live very long. Will you walk with me towards this threshold? Because I’ve been trying to carry it alone, and it is so hard. So they said yes. 

At this point for me, when my body can’t do anything else, like, when all my other functions are taken away that’s the only thing that matters, is connecting with people and making beauty. And that’s so subversive, and I think it’s easy to forget that. It’s life-giving. 

I mean holding is what weaving has always been about for me. Even before I got into caskets, I was weaving a lot of backpack baskets, pack-baskets. It was about holding and being held. Both in the process of making it, and then having this vessel to say “I’m with you. I’m gonna help you carry your life”. Caskets are just like a more massive version of that. For this threshold that is so human around dying. 

So this beauty is here. This vessel. This casket is here to let people engage with like a non-linear way of being. A deeper part of ourselves that doesn’t always have space to express how we are. The invitation is like, let this vessel do this literal and metaphorical thing. We don’t have to understand, it doesn’t have to make perfect sense. It’s a space to hold part of you. So that invitation is for people to write or draw or be with what’s here. Use the paper. Put it on there somehow, and leave it in here, kind of as an offering or as “This is the thing that can’t be held in some other way”. So here’s one way.