in collaboration with Gwen Hoeffgen, the TREES Lived Experience Committee, and the Pathways Study research team
Portland, Oregon
2026
The Door Is the Map is a collaborative mixed-media installation developed in connection with the Pathways Study, a participatory research project examining how people experience homelessness and navigate systems intended to support movement toward stable housing.
Co-facilitated and co-conceptualized with Gwen Hoeffgen, the project was created in collaboration with the TREES Lived Experience Committee and the Pathways Study research team. Together, the groups considered how lived experience might reveal the distance between the pathways systems promise and the pathways people must actually navigate.
Through a gathering around conversation, drawing, writing, and collective mapping, participants shared stories about the relationships, institutions, resources, and barriers that shaped their experiences. Their contributions reflect pathways that are rarely direct, including periods of waiting, repeated setbacks, fragmented systems, moments of connection, community support, and opportunities that make movement possible.
The project functions as a site for conversation about housing, creating space for people to listen, exchange experiences, and consider how the housing crisis affects us all. Centering lived experience as knowledge, The Door Is the Map asks who is given a key, which doors remain closed, and what it would take to build pathways toward housing together.
The resulting stories, drawings, and visual responses were brought together on a functional, freestanding door. Designed as a portable installation, the work can move between locations connected to displacement, transition, exclusion, community, and home. Each location changes how the stories are encountered and opens another space for conversation.
Find more information about the Pathways Study here