I couldn’t figure out where to post this so I started this new thread
> # Next Wave: Gentle Mothh Blends Art, Qigong, and Advocacy in the Hudson Valley
From Qigong classes to legislative work, the Kingston-based artist merges performance, publishing, and activism into a multidisciplinary practice grounded in embodiment and collective care.
by Maggie BaribaultApril 1, 2026
Kingston-based multidisciplinary artist Gentle Mothh moves between performance, photography, music, and movement practice, creating work that blends spiritual inquiry, community advocacy, and explorations of bodily autonomy and representation.
On Monday morning, Gentle Mothh is teaching Qigong through her online studio, Amahh Studio Qigong, which offers weekly free classes alongside paid memberships. Tuesday, she’s at the Albany statehouse, meeting with legislators about criminal justice reform, public health, gender, and bodily autonomy. On Wednesday, she’s drafting a press campaign for“The Oldest Profession,” a comedic sex-worker history show. In between, she’s writing music, sewing clothes, hiking near her Kingston home, and preparing for an album release that will double as a legislative advocacy event.
The 34-year-old multidisciplinary artist describes her guiding principle as “transformation toward harmony.” Whether she’s working in photography, music, performance, or movement, that idea anchors the work. “There’s less and less of a delineation between creative practice and any other aspect of my life,” she says. “I aspire to presence, and when I’m here, everything I do feels creative or generative.”
Her path to Qigong began during a period of emotional dysregulation and exhaustion. Seeking to reengage with spirituality, she began studying the practice with her aunt and felt an immediate shift. Now, her teaching model reflects both accessibility and financial sustainability: free classes alongside paid memberships that include twice-weekly Zoom sessions and recordings. She believes in resource-sharing, she says, but also in artists valuing their labor.
Her monthly income includes art and music royalties, the sale of a painting, Qigong memberships, and part-time work as a publicist and community organizer with Old Pros Organization, a national advocacy group led by and for sex workers pushing for decriminalization.
After entering the sex work industry and confronting stigma and “harmful legal structures,” Gentle Mothh began to see the community’s fight as connected to broader struggles around labor, gender, racial justice, and bodily autonomy. Her events and creative projects aim to platform the “immense wisdom” within the sex worker community and challenge public misconceptions.
Her photo book Giving Body, published in 2025, documents people performing erotic labor around the world. Organized through the Five Element Theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine: earth, metal, water, wood, and fire, the project pairs each element with a virtue: trust, courage, gentleness, kindness, and happiness. The primary subjects are professional sex workers who, she says, “embody and lead with these virtues.”
She aims to challenge narratives that flatten or criminalize the people she photographs, while imagining a world free from “state-sanctioned violence and the horrors of the carceral system.”
Across media, representation matters, Gentle Mothh says. “I’m interested in creating platforms to share with people from all the communities I belong to: the queers, asians, biracial babes, hoes. I want to see all of us in places of influence.”
