An Invitation to Practice Rest as a Form of Nourishment
What does it mean to rest? How do we make space for nourishment, and what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to slow down?
These were some of the questions at the heart of How Soft is a Stone?, an interactive exhibition by Georgina Hawitt, posAbilities' 2026 Artist in Residence. Developed over a four-month residency from July to October, the exhibition invited visitors to explore rest as an active, creative condition that makes play, curiosity, and growth possible.
Presented at Alternatives Gallery from October 12 - 23, the exhibition brought together sculptures, paintings, collaborative artworks, and interactive offerings to reflect on what emerges from conditions of rest.
An Invitation to Rest, Play, and Participate
The gallery was transformed into an interactive landscape, with a cozy corner of beanbags, pillows, and rugs offering visitors a space to sit, lie down, and rest. At the entrance, guests were invited to take a stone to keep and carry with them as they moved through the exhibition. Stone sculptures placed throughout the gallery also encouraged visitors to rearrange, move, and interact with the works, creating opportunities for play.
These small gestures of participation invited visitors to consider their own relationships with rest. How do we carry and disperse weight? How does support become visible? What happens when we understand softness, dependence, and rest not as weaknesses, but as foundations for connection and creativity?
Exploring Nourishment Through Community Workshops
We hosted two public workshops on September 16 and 18 2026, along with seperate workshops with persons served at Alternatives Studio. These gatherings offered opportunities for participants to explore their own experiences of rest, exhaustion, nourishment, and restoration through creative expression.
Using oil sticks, collage materials, and a series of reflective prompts, participants created individual artworks that moved through four stages: Reflect, Transform, Restore, and Share.
The process began by asking participants to consider how they experience a lack of rest, expressing feelings of exhaustion, overwhelm, or imbalance through colour, shape, texture, and mark-making.
Participants were then invited to physically transform their artworks through cutting, tearing, rearranging, and layering, before rebuilding their compositions in response to questions such as What does rest look, feel, sound, or taste like? and How do we create space for nourishment?
The resulting artworks came together as a larger collaborative installation within the exhibition, bringing individual experiences into conversation with one another and reflecting the many ways we seek and cultivate nourishment through creativity and community.
A Collective Closing
On October 23, we gathered for a well-attended closing reception to celebrate Georgina's residency and the many people who contributed to the exhibition.
The evening brought together community members, artists, collaborators, and visitors to experience the exhibition one final time and reflect on the ideas that had taken shape over the preceding months.
An important element of the closing was the continued transformation of the collaborative artwork created during the workshops. Through a gesture of cutting and sharing, elements of the larger piece could be taken home, allowing the work to move beyond the gallery and into the lives of the people who had helped create it.
This final transformation reflected one of the central ideas of the exhibition: that care, nourishment, and creativity are not fixed or finite, but can be shared, redistributed, and carried forward.
