There are a gazillion ways to create, build, fortify, and reside in a home. When you work from that sanctified space, how does it withstand being intertwined with your lived experience?

What Is a Mobile Death Doula and Art Practice?

The vision for this project revolves around a motorhome being converted into a hobbit house on wheels. The phrase slipped off my tongue while my mind was in the cave of imagination. What was I doing nestled in the underbelly of my mind you may ask? Well, pulling away the brambles to unearth the capabilities left dormant for quite a long time.

The imagination is a place to design strategic actions, expand a sense of wonder, and improve a desired skillset through education, curiosity, and practice. These ever-evolving layers of intention are used to support multiple forms of work simultaneously. This is the practice. As a death doula and an artist, the layers are necessary for an exchange between unnecessary baggage, released from responsibility, and returned as useful tools. The recycled process takes time to master and patience to watch yourself fall apart over and over again.

A mobile death doula and art practice is a safe space of place that has enough comfort to hold you while dissolving into pieces of yourself and enough grit to keep setting the sails with continued cadence. To be mobile is to be tethered to movement, not just with the road, but as a companion for refuge.

A Mobile Art Studio for Grief, Ritual, and Community Care

This motorhome has a multitude of functions devised to be a stable living space and a mobile art studio. A defined fieldwork base that has the capacity to document, record deathcare practices only with a participant’s informed consent, ethical clarity, and cultural humility as its pillars. A traveling point of connection for community care networks to expand their outreach, strengthen the bridge of experience, and be celebrated for their own vision.

The word methodology is defined as the systematic, theoretical analysis of the methods and principles associated with a branch of knowledge, acting as a blueprint for research, business, or education. A methodology chooses specific tools to ensure data reliability, validity, and reproducibility. Together, these four branches of the motorhome form an infrastructure and methodology that I will continue to come back to for revisons. The work is the maintenance of this project and revolves within the deathcare ecosystem.

Understanding the Deathcare Ecosystem in North America

Deathcare, in its broadest sense, includes the cultural, spiritual, practical, and communal practices surrounding death, dying, and remembrance. It is both deeply personal and profoundly collective.

And right now, it is undergoing a quiet but significant transformation.

Why Documenting Deathcare Traditions Matters

Across North America, there is a resurgence of:

Community-based deathcare
Home funerals
Death doulas and end-of-life guides
Alternative rituals and memorial practices
Culturally specific approaches to grief and transition

At the same time, much of this work remains:

Under-documented
Underfunded
Fragmented across regions and communities
At risk of being lost, misunderstood, or commodified

This project responds to that moment.

Building a Living Archive of Death and Grief Practices

Through travel, documentation, and relationship-building, the intention is to create a living archive of deathcare practices—one that is rooted not in extraction, but in consent, reciprocity, and cultural humility.

This means:

Listening before documenting
Building relationships before storytelling
Ensuring that knowledge is shared in ways that honor its origins

How Mobility Expands Access to Community-Based Care Work

Mobility is not incidental to this work—it is essential.

Many of these practices are place-based. They exist in specific communities, often outside of dominant institutional frameworks. A fixed location limits access.

A mobile structure allows for:

Direct engagement with diverse communities
Longitudinal relationship-building across regions
Flexibility in responding to emerging needs and invitations

In this way, the motorhome becomes a vessel—not just for movement, but for connection.

Under The Root: Art, Mortality, and Social Practice

This work is also an extension of Under The Root, an ongoing practice exploring the intersections of art, mortality, and social ecosystems.

If death is a universal experience, then deathcare is one of the most profound expressions of culture.

And yet, we rarely create systems that allow those expressions to be documented, shared, and sustained in ethical ways.

This project is an attempt to do exactly that.

Not as an institution.

But as a living, evolving practice.

For death doulas, this may look like a network that connects practitioners across regions.

For arts organizations, it offers a model of socially engaged, field-based creative work.

For mutual aid networks, it provides a framework for integrating deathcare into broader systems of community support.

For larger organizations and corporations, it presents an opportunity to support infrastructure that bridges cultural, social, and care-based work in meaningful ways.

A New Model for Death Doulas, Artists, and Cultural Workers

The vision is not small.

But it is grounded.

And it begins with something very simple:

A space that can move.

A Hobbit House on Wheels

It would be easy to describe this as a housing solution.

It is—but that’s only the surface.

The vision is something more layered: a “hobbit house on wheels.” A motorhome that functions not only as shelter, but as a mobile studio, a fieldwork base, and a point of connection.

A place to live.
A place to work.
A place to listen.

Because this work exists at the intersection of art and the evolving deathcare ecosystem—a space that asks how we, as humans, tend to grief, transition, ritual, and remembrance.

Across cultures, deathcare looks different. It is shaped by history, belief, land, and community. And yet, much of this knowledge remains fragmented, under-documented, or inaccessible.

The intention of this project is to move through those spaces—not as an extractor, but as a participant and witness.

To document deathcare practices.
To build relationships with death doulas, caregivers, and communities.
To create a living archive rooted in consent, cultural humility, and storytelling.

Mobility makes this possible.

Not as constant movement, but as access—to places, people, and practices that are otherwise difficult to reach from a fixed location.

In this way, the motorhome becomes more than infrastructure.

It becomes a methodology.

A way of working that mirrors the very thing it seeks to understand: that care is not static. That it travels. That it is built through connection.

This is also an extension of an ongoing practice—Under The Root—which explores the intersections of art, mortality, and social ecosystems.

What is being built here is not separate from that work.

It is its next form.

And like any living system, it will grow through relationships.

Be a Connection with Conversation and Community

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SHARE: https://undertheroot.studio/artist-cat-clove-motorhome-updates

GOFUNDME: https://www.gofundme.com/f/motorhome-for-artist-and-clove

CONTACT: https://undertheroot.studio/contact

Quick Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Mobile Death Doula Practice?

A mobile deathcare practice allows a practitioner to travel between communities, offering support, education, and documentation while engaging with diverse cultural approaches to death and care. A mobile death doula practice is a care model where a death doula travels to different communities to provide end-of-life support, education, and documentation. It expands access to deathcare services while allowing practitioners to engage with diverse cultural practices and community needs.

What Does a Death Doula Do?

A death doula provides non-medical support to individuals and families before, during, and after death. This includes emotional care, ritual guidance, legacy planning, and helping navigate end-of-life decisions in a way that aligns with personal and cultural values.

Why focus on documenting deathcare traditions?

Many deathcare practices are culturally specific and under-documented. This project aims to preserve and share this knowledge in ethical, relationship-based ways that respect community ownership and context. Documenting deathcare practices preserves cultural knowledge, supports community-based care models, and creates accessible resources for future generations. Many deathcare traditions are underrepresented or at risk of being lost without intentional documentation.

What Is a Mobile Art and Deathcare Project?

A mobile art and deathcare project combines creative practice with end-of-life care work, often using travel to document stories, rituals, and community experiences. It functions as both a creative platform and a tool for cultural preservation and connection.

How does this connect to art?
Art is used as a tool for documentation, reflection, and storytelling—helping translate complex experiences of grief, ritual, and care into accessible and meaningful forms.