pədhədəbil/pədhədəb
Spring and summer selections from Before the Fire Lit My Dreams
Epiphany Couch
3rd July - 30th August 2025
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay Burning Cascade Head, she describes a ritual in which the land itself is set ablaze to call the salmon home—a ceremony that wove people, waterways, and the earth into a cycle of renewal. This act of reciprocity bound the community to the land and the salmon, keeping both in balance. But as the ceremony faded, so too did that balance, leaving only traces of what once held the world together.
The title of this exhibition, Before the Fire Lit My Dreams, is drawn from a moment in Kimmerer’s essay when a shift occurs. We move from unknowing to knowing, from disconnection to connection. The fire lights the way toward deeper understanding, evoking that profound instant of awakening when we begin to recognize the threads that tie us to each other and to the living world that sustains us.
This project is my attempt to connect with those threads, to touch the place where memory meets presence. Originally conceived as a yearlong cycle of 12 film photograph diptychs—one for each month—this refined exhibition presents seasonal images from spring and summer (pədhədəbil and pədhədəb). Through these select images, we witness the seasons change, reflecting on the ways our families, tribal lands, and waterways hold stories of time and place. Many of these images are in-camera double exposures, layered frames that evoke the interwoven connections between people and land, seasons and cycles. I invite you to not only witness these connections but to reflect on your own place within the ever-turning cycles of this planet, finding a mirror to your own relationship with nature’s rhythms.
At the base of each work, I’ve placed a stack of poems—my own words as small offerings. Please take home any or all poems that move you.
— Epiphany Couch
Epiphany Couch
Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores generational knowledge, storytelling, and our relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds. Working across photography, beadwork, weaving, and collage, she reinterprets traditional forms to create images, installations, and sculptural works that engage ancestral knowledge and invite new ways of understanding. Her practice is rooted in unconventional collaboration—across time, between generations, and with the natural world—recognizing these relationships as vital to sustaining memory, culture, and identity.
Couch’s work transforms personal and collective histories into heirloom-like objects that hold space for reflection, care, and healing. Drawing from family stories, archival research, her own dreams, and her childhood in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington), she creates work that is both intimate and expansive, blurring the line between artifact and art.
As a spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/mixed European artist, Couch centers cultural knowledge and community connection in both her process and presentation. In 2024, she was a commissioned artist for Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places, a featured artist in the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, and a Ford Family Foundation’s Oregon Visual Artist Studios at MASS MoCA resident. Her work has been acquired for public collections and exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs across the United States. Couch lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she is a 2025 GLEAN Program artist-in-residence and a member of the artist-run gallery Carnation Contemporary.
https://www.epiphanycouch.com/
Instagram: @epiphany_couch_art
