Jessica gives me new insight into what an activist heart can be. She writes for National Catholic Reporter and the FemCatholic contributor blog with clarity and insight into social issues like trans-inclusive feminism, white privilege, and purity culture.  If you follow her on Instagram @jgerhardtmusic, you can see her work with @pasadena4palestine as well as reels incorporating her songs and embroidery in stop motion:

“and I fold like a paper crane in your hands” stop motion reel

When we met on Zoom, we were both comfortable in our homes. Jessica wore a fluffy scarf and a big sweatshirt. She was surrounded by shadows from natural light coming in a window. She talked with her hands while she shared the ways she actualizes what’s important to her. 

me: You are a ukulelist…I love that word. Do you use that word all the time?

JG: Yeah, Ukulele-ist, I think it’s in my Instagram bio…I don’t know if that’s the word Hawai’ian people use, or ukulele player…

me: I feel like we’re making the world a better place with whatever we make, be it music, or embroidery, or words that nobody ever thought of before…it’s like planting things and they bloom. I didn’t write down questions – this could get weird. I want to know about your embroidery. How long have you been doing that? 

JG: Embroidery? It’s just really relaxing and centering to me. I tried when I was a kid, and then kind of lost it for a long time. I think I started seeing more embroidery art in 2020, because I think people had more down time. So I’d talked about wanting to do it, and my roommate at the time bought me a little kit. It became this way I could use art to make gifts for people. When I put out my single, “Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself,” I thought it would be cute to embroider those lyrics and have affirmation hoops. I’ve sold a few of those hoops. 

It took four years to get the album done, and then I was like, “Oh yeah, you need to have ART to go with your album…What if I hand-embroider cover art for the album, and for the singles?” That has made it take like another year to get my record ready, because I got a little too ambitious. I thought, “I am going to hand-embroider art for every single one of the songs on the record,” and there’s ten songs. I have ADHD; I found out about two years ago. One of the things that’s common with ADHD is Task Avoidance, for either fear of failure, or fear of not doing things perfect. I think that really resonates for me: What if the stitches are off, or what if people don’t think it looks right for the music? What if I don’t release things strategically enough? All these thoughts were keeping me from doing the embroidery.

me: you just said something really interesting, about the picture going with the music. How much did you think about that? I’m guessing sometimes it was just obvious; you knew exactly what the picture should be…

JG: I would draw out all the concepts before I would stitch them. One of the recurring themes in a lot of the art is hands; there’s folded paper cranes; the wings of dawn – one of the lyrics is the wings of dawn in “Psalm 139” so I used the image again of hands and that paper crane, but with another background. One of the other songs on the record is “Sighing Dove,” so I hand-stitched a mourning dove. 

me: I have a clan of them living at my house. Worst nest-builders ever. Have you seen that?

JG: that’s what the song is about, kind of…I had kind of this miraculous experience. I was going through a break-up in 2017 and was super heartbroken, so I started to do this Catholic devotional and prayed a 54-day rosary novena. Basically, when you pray the rosary every day for 54 days, the first half of that, the novena, is in petition. So I was praying for healing and peace, the ability to let go, and trust that the person I broke up with would be okay, too. And then the second half of the novena is thanksgiving and gratitude. And at the very end of that novena, I came home from work one day to my old apartment – just a two story six-unit apartment building – on the wall between the doors of two of the units, there was a fire extinguisher box, like at eye level. A mourning dove built a nest on top of that fire extinguisher box, right next to my front door. It’s a really dumb place for a nest. It’s a very flat nesxt, very small, you could just pick up an egg. That was where they’d built it, and it felt like a strange sign that maybe my prayer had been answered. I decided to write a song about it. I was praying the rosary, invoking the intercession of Mary, looking for poetic ways to describe Mary. In one of the litanies, they use the name ‘Sighing Dove’ for Mary. It was a perfect way to contextualize this, and even just looking at what mourning doves tend to symbolize: peace, healing, moving on. It just felt really…poetic, and beautiful that that happened. So that’s what that song is about. 

me: you do watercolor, right? 

JG: Yes. I started doing art when I was a kid. My dad’s dad worked as an interior designer and taught at RISD (The Rhode Island School of Design.) My godmother was also a painter and an artist, so I had a lot of visual artistic influences from the time I was young. We grew up pretty low-income, and all the extracurriculars I was a part of were like free after-school programs. I took a number of painting courses in college, mostly with acrylic and then did some oil. Watercolor I messed around with a little in high school and started to revisit that also during COVID. I had a lot of fun with creative play.

When I was a kid, because I had so many art influences in my life, I was looking at going to art school. I didn’t end up applying; I wanted to be a psychologist. But visual art was my secondary, like “my lane.” 

I started songwriting when I was a kid, but didn’t start playing ukulele until high school. I really didn’t see myself pursuing music as a career until halfway through college. “That’s a hobby; if you’re gonna do artistic thing, it would make more sense to do what you have experience with, which is visual art.” But yeah, it all kind of came together in an interesting way. I think during the lockdown, I lost all my jobs pretty much overnight, and spent a lot of time just making things. It made me realize I’d be really happy if most of my life I just got to spend time making things. 

I like mixing it up. I like doing watercolor; I like doing embroidery. I like making jewelry and rosaries and all of the things I got to do with my hands in addition to playing instruments and songwriting. 

me: I want to know about gay rosaries. Those are so cool!

JG: I started making rosaries my first year out of college. I’m Catholic, I grew up in L.A., but most of the people I knew as a kid had moved out of state or were doing other things. I was looking to make new friends in the city, and there was a woman in the young adult community who was offering rosary-making nights. I was just so excited after making my first one that I wanted to get all my own materials and tools and start making them myself. I think an ex of mine told me his grandfather was a rosary maker, and I was like, “That’s a thing you can be??” 

A couple years ago, when my partner and I had been together for about nine months, they came out about being non-binary. I’ve always had attraction toward people of my own and other genders, and I think I stuck to mostly dating men probably because of moving about in the Catholic Church, working in the Catholic Church, and I sort of had this internalized bi-phobia. Like it’s okay for other people to be queer, but I can’t be, or I don’t count…so when my partner came out as non-binary, it sort of forcibly queered me, but also it gave me space to have to reckon with my own queerness.

In my desire to be an ally to my partner, I asked, “What are the pride colors for being non-binary?” I think because when I’m making rosaries I’m sorting things by color and quantity, thinking about how I arrange the beads, I realized I could use those pride colors and arrange the beads in those colors to represent those flags. Also, just because I am a queer Catholic person…it’s a strange intersection of identities and it’s a complicated one. The more I started to see myself not just as an ally to that community but a part of that community, I wanted to create things that could help affirm belonging within. Catholic queer people belong. I wanted to show that by making rosaries that uplift and affirm them. 

me: I remember – it’s a vague memory; I was young – meeting someone who was devotedly homosexual and also devotedly Catholic. And I remember hearing the adults saying things like they forget children can hear, but realizing it was a conflict, but realizing it was a social conflict. 

JG: When I first started working in youth ministry and confirmation I was right out of college. I’d had some exposure in college to evangelicalism, and I think some of the all-or-nothing thinking impacted me for a little while. When I first came out of college, I was a little zealous; when I started working with teens, they were just like normal teens, and they weren’t “on fire with the divine love for our God, our Lord and Savior…” I was like, NONE of them are ready for confirmation. Then I had a humbling come-to: When I was 14, I wasn’t some saint on cloud 9, all high on Jesus; I was just a normal teen, but I did get to choose for myself whether I wanted to receive the sacrament. I think if you’re open, then maybe you’re ready, because God can do the rest, and maybe receiving the sacrament can bring you to another place in your spiritual life. But ultimately, I think it has to have your consent and be your choice. 

We’re such a culture of “now you’re this age, you do this thing.” I would love to help people move against that culture, but I’m not working as a youth minister anymore. It’s for the best for me at this time; it’s still something that weighs on my heart and that I care about deeply.

me: This is probably post-Covid, too, but I’m at very much a Pick Your Battles stage. I cannot fight for all the things that matter to me right now, and I have to let myself be okay with that. There’s room later -and that’s part of faith, too, faith that there is room for it later. 

JG: Yeah, I think of the sacraments less like you have to catch them all, like Pokémon or something? Like eucharist, for example, which is weekly, it’s not like you get a sticker. It’s not quantity; it’s quality. I think God is a big fan of consent. I think it’s all about your relationship with God at the end of the day. I think the bigger, more important thing is the day-to-day walk with the God of your understanding. 

me: you and I met at FAR-West 2023. There was something interesting going on there; there were a lot of things going on right then that were important to the Jewish community.

JG: that was right as, or right after, October 7th happened. 

Me: Yes. Bernie Pearl, representing the Ash Grove, was in Israel when he agreed he wanted to give the Best of the West award, and then we lost track of him for a couple days. Basically, he got off the plane and came to FAR-West because that’s how important it was to him to give the award. I came to understand the annual proceedings as ritual, as legacy. The Folk community is our tribe, too. We have elders, we have generations. Ritual holds community together, and humans need community. 

What I’ve been doing all my life by avoiding rituals was avoiding community, setting myself outside intentionally. It’s not a good long-term problem-solving method. I took it to extremes.

JG: I think if you have any skepticism toward conformity, it can feel like a threat to one’s own individuality. In extreme cases, it can act that way: “You only belong if you do all the same things that we do.” If you don’t feel like certain parts of who you are inherently and intrinsically fit within that conformity, you can’t belong. Interdependence is hard. Co-dependence is kind of everywhere; it’s really pervasive. It’s in a lot of our institutions, and our relationships have a lot of codependency, and by codependency, I mean a compulsive element, where you’re trying to control the other with your behavior. Interdependence is vulnerable, where you do let yourself need someone. It isn’t putting more on a person than they’re able to give you. It’s mutual willingness to give and opening yourself up to receiving. It can be hard to trust and allow yourself to experience need with others within a community, but I think there’s a lot of richness in it. 

me: I think the folk community is very receptive to all of that. 

JG: Absolutely.

Follow Jessica Gerhardt‘s art page on Instagram @workofhumanhands as well as her music @jgerhardtmusic for news on her next release this summer. Find her at your favorite connection:  YouTube, BandCamp, Etsy, and/or Patreon. If you’re averse to social media, or even if you aren’t, sign up for Jessica’s mailing list here: Jessica Gerhardt Music

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debora Ewing is a peer reviewer for Consilience Science-Based Poetry Journal and Global Content Editor at Igneus Press. Find her art and word everywhere, including Jerry Jazz Musician, Shot Glass Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Cholla Needles, and Dodging the Rain. Follow her on “X” and Instagram @DebsValidation, and into seedy pool halls but probably not dark alleys.