Meet The Motherline of Southern Oregon!
Ariadne Grace - Resident Artist
Ariadne Grace (née Gina Angelique) is a choreographer, reparation gardener and mother of 2 incredible children. Her work is steeped in rural community, where she has been homesteading for 15 years, and is largely informed by regenerative and sustainable garden and farm practices and the intersection of art and agriculture. She is investigating rural themes of generational isolation and poverty; women’s issues: domestic abuse, survivorhood, single motherhood; and the role of women in forging a path from extractive cultures to reparation and restoration. She is currently writing a book on parenting in reflection of 13 years of homeschooling her children.
As the Motherline’s artistic director and dancemaker, Ariadne articulates a dance idiom consisting of “actualism” where personal and community ritual and inquiry informs transformative dance theater that does not pretend. She often engages in extensive community interviews before creating original work. She weaves Butoh, Balinese, Hip-hop and Contemporary Dance to create full length stories around pivotal issues of our time. Today, she is focused on place and people based movement she calls “Planet Dance” that connects the human body garden to the earth’s expression of body we call nature.
Cindy Palacios - Co-Director
Cindy Palacios is a pioneer in modern-day simple living skills for families. Her homestead on almost 200 acres of woods in Southern Oregon is a proving ground for pushing the limits of off-grid, mostly hand-tools self-sufficient living.
Cindy lives on a homestead that includes a water storage and collection system she designed (but not running water!), an off-grid mini-solar power supply that she built to supply the small amount of electricity needed, gardens carved out of old logging landings, and buildings made from poles and logs from the woods around her. Along with her four kids, she has created a vibrant homeschool connection group, taught self-sufficiency classes for kids (including gardening, sewing, and building), and raised four individuals who are deeply connected to the earth, having been immersed in real-world, sustainable, hands-on living from day 1. She has also led numerous community efforts for improvements, such as a series of enormously successful community clean-up events for trash in the public woods, a campaign to increase public awareness around the hazardous practice of spraying pesticides along all of our roads and the ease at which you can opt-out of the program, and a used tire recycling program.
Cindy is deeply committed to simple, sustainable, connected living, practicing radical simplicity every day, and sharing her accumulated skills and energy to improve the interactions between the people and the land all around.
Alisa Ocean - Co-Director
Alisa Ocean is a lover of plants, animals, and people.
She has been profoundly shaped by the experience of loving the three amazing humans that passed through her womb, and witnessing them evolve into their own unique, kind people. Alisa has spent over a decade living on a small homestead in Southern Oregon with her family, growing food and caring for critters, gardens and the surrounding creek and forest. She regularly hugs trees, worships nature and gathers new experiences.
Growing up in a musical family, Alisa has always felt a deep connection to music. She discovered the power of expression through dancing when her kids joined RiverStars in 2013 and she took one of Ariadne’s life changing classes. Through the years she has helped as a volunteer and costume maker for RiverStars. She is inspired to be contributing in her capacity as Co-director!
Alisa is currently the manager of the Cave Junction Farmers Market. She is inspired to help create space for the farmers, artists, and the people of the Illinois Valley to gather and connect around local foods, art and agriculture. She loves learning and experimenting with food, ferments, making cheese, and inventing recipes. In her 6 years as manager Alisa has written grants to secure over $113,000 in funding to match SNAP at the market, which benefits low income customers and small local farms, helping increase food security in the rural Illinois Valley. She also helped create the Cultivate Kids program which is responsible for hands-on education and a thriving onsite community garden at the market grown by local youth participants. Alisa considers herself a life learner, and has worn many hats. She is still deciding what she wants to be when she grows up.
Trina Christine - Filmaker
Trina Christine is a filmmaking creative in the Pacific Northwest, and founder of Into The Vow. Trina started Into the Vow (Trina Christine Photography LLC) to combine her love of videography with her obsession with weddings. She truly enjoy connecting with new people, and always trying to surround herself with positive, uplifting energy!
Trina is originally from Oregon, and has also discovered a passion for traveling. She spent several years as a professional ballroom dancer, travelling with the Utah Ballroom Dance Company throughout the U.S. Filming called to her, though, and she now runs a full-time Wedding business, in addition to working on special projects with Non-Profits in the Southern Oregon community. Trina is an integral partner in the Motherline, capturing and expressing the Motherline vision.
Trina has spent the past few years discovering what truly brings joy to her life, and has found that that’s turning her creative outlook into a reality as a filmmaker. Being able to create what she envisions in her head has been a life-long pursuit and she is grateful and proud to have created a business where she can truly express herself.
Iris Chinook
Iris Chinook is a believer in keeping it simple and doing it with what you already have. After a life-time of minimum-wage jobs she retired to southern Oregon and began the life she had waited for her whole life. A life that included deep night skies filled with stars, clean air, clean water, abundant wildlife and quiet places to explore and fall in love with. She won the earth lottery when she did.
At the turn of the century she found herself working the only corporate job she ever held and after an afternoon trying different scenarios on a retirement calculator she realized that she would never have enough to retire on and decided to quit, move from Seattle to a tiny homestead outside of Cave Junction and, to this day, she fervently believes that it is never too late to be who you really want to be, regardless of income.
She became ensnared by the love of fiber, specifically wool and silk, after working at the Weaving Works in Seattle for a just over a decade where she learned to weave, make paper, sculpt hard-shelled gourds, dye fiber, spin, knit, crochet and weave baskets.
Iris has been a production spinner from the beginning and has successfully sold both her yarn and unique garments for over 20 years at local markets, online, and through consignment with local shops. She prides herself on surrendering to the experience of spinning yarn, letting the fiber tell her what it wants to be, and also having the hard-won skill needed to create the exact yarn she wants for a specific purpose and project. She believes there is a deep spiritual component to participating in this ancient craft and frequently feels connected to all the generations of ancestors that have twisted plant and animal fibers into something useful throughout our evolution.
Living on the banks of a river with extensive surrounding wetlands, she is passionate about being a careful, loving steward of the water quality she is so grateful for. The west fork of the Illinois River flows out of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness just a few miles from her homestead of twenty years and has the clearest, cleanest water she has ever experienced.
She keeps it that way by having a saw-dust toilet and a grey-water system that is purified by cattails and other plants. Nothing goes down the drain that is not the safest thing she can find. Water is the universal solvent and many times it’s a powerful cleaner in its own right. At the base of the old-growth cedars that outline the wetland behind her home, native Western azaleas spread their fragrant blossoms. A pair of mated Piliated Woodpeckers grace the branches above, there are puma prints in the mud below and two distinct migrations of salmon come home to mate and die steps from her back door. She believes these things represent real wealth.
She considers herself the resident Crone of the Motherline and is thrilled to be a part of the work they are doing.
Midori Urehara
Midori Uehara is from suburb in southern island of Japan. She was inspired by a bird and flew around to search for a perfect place to nestle since her teenage through 20s. Now she has lived 10 years in the beautiful woods in Southern Oregon where she calls it her home.
She still carries her heritage and cultures where her original home was. Incorporating her traditional food and fresh garden vegetable keeps her feeling of being home, where her mom grew garden and cooked healthy meals. Miso, fermented bean paste, was one of her important cultural food that she started making for her own to comfort herself. Later, she taught miso making class and started a miso business to share locally crafted high-quality miso with community members. It’s now available over 15 locations in Oregon. She is the only miso sommelier and certified Koji instructor in the state. When it comes to Miso and Koji, she is very happy to be called nerd about it. Since Japanese food culture is deeply connected with fermentation, she also enjoys making Umeboshi, fermented plums, Natto, Nukazuke, Kimchi and some other fermented foods. She believes that working together with local microbes is one of the greatest way to the happy gut.
Midori supported raising her partner’s four wonderful children, and introduced her weird food to them. There were a lot of challenges and tears she experienced over the years. Now as they become young adults, they appreciate the foods she provided, and she feels so rewarded. Each year, her love, curiosity and passion for growing better garden gets bigger and bigger. Growing ingredients for own ferments, reducing food waste and making better soil by using fermentation technique, and eating healthy and delicious food excites her. Midori loves growing older in this environment and community, and dancing and learning with Motherline keeps her heart filled.
Elizabeth Brooks
Elizabeth Brooks has a regenerative polyculture farm located in the forests of Southern Oregon. With hugelkultur gardens, free range ducks, colony meat rabbits, and Jersey milk cows her life is dedicated to family and farm.
After two decades as a hairstylist and salon/gallery owner in Indiana she moved to the PNW to fulfill her dreams of stewarding a small farm in the woods. She considers her biggest accomplishment in life to be working the land and animals together with her four children.