The hope for the “Woven Wave” is that people will feel a sense of belonging.
The massive public art installation isn’t just a sight to see by the sea, but a chance for people to interact by weaving their favorite memories of Doheny State Beach into the art piece.
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The Doheny Surf and Art Festival, to be held Saturday and Sunday, June 27-28, is a summertime staple in Dana Point, bringing art, music and surf culture together. The mornings kick off with a community surf competition, while the festival offers everything from live music, art on display, a beer garden, food trucks, vintage surfboard collections and a shark education booth.
“It’s super important for the Doheny community, it gives them a surf competition in the middle of summer and something to do outdoors,” said Scott Sherman, Doheny State Beach Foundation manager.
The “Woven Wave” piece will be a showstopper, organizers said, made possible with a grant from the California Humanities Foundation.
Artist Kacie Lyn Martinez, 39, was on a trip about a decade ago, working in the technology sector at the time, and paging through a magazine about crafting with her mother.
Her mom pointed at a photo of a person weaving, mentioning that Martinez’s grandfather was a weaver.
“He passed when I was very young, all these stories just started flowing out of her as she was telling me about my grandfather. My mother would go and help in this factory and learn different things,” Martinez recalled.
On her 30th birthday, Martinez said she decided to take a private lesson in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for two weeks, to tap into her family heritage.
A month later, her mother died in a car accident. Weaving became her therapy to process the grief, Martinez said, the repetitive motion allowing her to lose herself in her art, at the same time feeling connected to her ancestors.
“It was my lifeline in those early months,” she said.
She started being recognized for her work about eight years ago and was asked to do residencies for large-scale tapestries that would bring people together to weave something shared.
“I’m really interested in these as a collective synchrony, usually incorporating writing or drawing — weaving, but also reflecting and sharing,” she said.
Martinez said she was living in New York in 2020 but yearned to be connected to nature, to see stars in the night sky. She wanted to be in the desert, so she bought a trailer she called Joleen, and ended up in San Diego County.
It was the place she needed to heal, still pained from the loss of her mom, she said, but then, she met her husband, who introduced her to the ocean and surfing.
If the desert was the place she grieved, the ocean became where she started to heal and grow, Martinez said, tapping into the fluidity of the ocean as a metaphor of her own life.
“My art itself is a lot of desert and a lot of ocean,” said Martinez, who has most recently landed in Costa Mesa, where she is also an artist in residence at Serendipity Labs. “My favorite days are when I surf in the morning and go to the desert in the afternoon. You can really get that polar extreme within a few hours.”
She has had a booth at the Doheny Surf and Art Festival the last few years and brainstormed with Sherman about a piece that would let people connect, and ultimately become stewards of, the park.
She also recently started the State Parks’ first art program at the park, a monthly public art community class anyone can join.
The “Woven Wave” is very “dynamic,” Martinez said, of the 15-foot-long and 8-foot-tall piece.
“The idea is a collective wave celebrating Doheny,” she said. “We’re doing that by collecting people’s memories.”
Cards that say “my Doheny memory” will allow people to draw pictures or write their favorite memories that will be woven into the piece.
“The real hope is belonging. People find a sense of sharing and contributing, but also being seen and seeing others, at a place that people have so many memories, so many experiences with,” Martinez said. “And to create a new memory from that, I really feel as if this piece, at its heart, is about belonging.”
People will be able to add their memories to the “Woven Wave” both days of the festival. Martinez will be on site on Sunday.