Your Portal

0 Harvard Square Cambridge, MA 02138 (next to the Harvard T station)

About the Installation

A place to sense and reflect.

Your Portal offers Cambridge a quiet invitation: to pause, restore, and belong in public space.

At Cambridge KiOSK, a public hub in Harvard Square operated by CultureHouse., exhibited September, 2025.

You arrive to a sign that reads Come home to yourself, its letters arranged in an upward smile. Images of hands draw you into the space. Fabric panels hang from the ceiling, nine feet tall, doubled in layers of organza over opaque material. They sway in the open air, their printed hand gestures creating an optical illusion of movement. Four steps invite you to try the Double Thumb Hug yourself, a gesture that invites calm and self-reflection.

Inside, plants, green and white signage, and a table with chairs create a sense of welcome. A ribbon strung across the window holds notes left by people who came before you, headed by prompts: Here, I feel... This gesture makes me think about... When I pause like this, I imagine... Over seventy responses, drawn, scribbled, and carefully written, accumulated over the course of the installation, shared by people of all ages.

At the center is a two-way mirror. With the help of a CultureHouse guide, you see your whole self and someone else at the same time. Maybe you move together as one. Several people left with a sense of belonging, or a memory of the many others who had passed through that Harvard Square hub before them.

Personal Connection
As a child, I often stood in the Square watching Brother Blue tell stories. The cobblestones were painted in bright circles, his face paint and shimmering butterflies alive with movement, song, and eye contact. That spirit of openness and transformation left a lasting impression, and it continues to guide this participatory work today.

Research & Questions

This installation was also a living research lab, exploring how design strategies — mirrors, gestures, sensory prompts, and sequence — might create conditions for grounding, calm, and personal agency. The research asks:

• How can we carve out a quiet sense of place, self, belonging, and wonder in public?

• What design strategies invite curiosity and open access to deeper self-awareness?

• In today’s shifting landscapes, with arts and learning spaces under pressure, technology dominating attention, and Harvard Square itself reshaped by construction, how can we hold on to ourselves?

• How can we see beyond our own experience in restorative ways?

Why The Double Thumb Hug Matters

The Double Thumb Hug is my adaptation of a simple hand gesture, expanded from therapeutic origins into public art. This practice addresses stress and calm as social justice concerns, offering an accessible way to reorient through voluntary touch and attention. Research shows that even small, intentional movements of the fingers can influence heart rhythm through vagal pathways, giving the nervous system a chance to settle. By offering this practice freely in public space, I make therapeutic tools accessible without needing a practitioner, with messaging and design that can align more readily participants who may not find cultural resonance in traditional wellness settings. Related practices such as Sounder Sleep and Jin Shin Jyutsu share this spirit of hand-based restoration. Rooted in my training in therapeutic massage, GYROTONIC, and the Feldenkrais Method, the Double Thumb Hug offers a way to slow down, notice your breath, and come home to yourself with your hands.

Supported in part by grants from the Arrow Street Arts Fund at the Cambridge Community Foundation and by an Art for Social Justice Grant from Cambridge Arts, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.