Between Worlds: Jacqueline López and the Practice of Becoming
Picture a circle of chairs filled edge to edge, members and first-time guests shoulder to shoulder, and one woman standing in the middle holding a mask she made with her own hands. Every mask she lifted carried a chapter of her life, and she told each chapter out loud.
That was last week at District House, when Jacqueline López led her interactive workshop, "Between Worlds: Art, Altered States & The Practice of Becoming."
Jacqueline was born on the border of Paraguay and Brazil and spent years working as a CPA. Artist was a word she reserved for other people. Then her late partner, Michael, passed away, and the identity she had built around that life went with him.
Grief rearranged everything. She left Santa Barbara and moved to the Bay Area, and in that new city she started trying new things. Mask making was one of them. Loss cleared the ground, and something unexpected began to grow.
Jacqueline brought some of her early masks to the workshop and shared the story and inspiration behind each one. These were made during a time of transition, by a woman who was still meeting her own hands as an artist's hands. Held up in the middle of the circle, each mask became a window into a stretch of her journey.
Her work draws on Hispanic-Portuguese and Guaraní Indigenous iconography, alchemy, and her mother's tradition of treating dreams and visions as creative instruction. Grief, celebration, and becoming all live in the same visual language.
Jacqueline traced her path from her psychedelic awakening all the way to the artist she is today, and plant medicine played a huge role along the way. It opened a door, and she walked through it into shamanic art, ancestral memory, and a life of purpose.
Awakening arrives in many forms. For some it comes through art, for some through loss, for some through the plants. For Jacqueline it came through all three, braided together.
What stood in the center of that circle was a person who had gone through the fire and come out the other side. Artist. Protester. A badass woman who stands for purpose and cause. Her story gives people permission to find their own voices and meet the artist living inside them.
The room was captivated from the first mask to the last. Members and guests sat together in one circle and received a story about grief, identity, and reinvention, and the room held all of it with care.
This is what District House exists for. A third space where a former CPA can stand up and speak about altered states, ancestral memory, and the death of a partner, and a room full of people can witness it fully. Evenings like this one remind us that healing and creativity grow from the same root, and that community is the soil.
Thank you, Jacqueline, for crossing the threshold with us and for showing so many people what becoming can look like.
If her story stirred something in you, come find your seat in the circle at our next District House event. Bring the question you have been carrying: what are you ready to shed?
