Weighted pads are used by healthcare professionals as a sensory tool, offering a deep-touch pressure, a proprioceptive input that can have a calming, organizing effect. These objects are used therapeutically by people with sensory processing disorders, psychiatric conditions, Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder, and autism, as well as in classrooms to help students maintain focus.

Soft, blue, weighted pads and transformed neck pillows produced by Susan Wolf are available for conference participants throughout Running with Concepts and Wolf will lead a movement-based workshop with the objects during the final afternoon of the conference. Beyond a wish to soothe the anxieties of conference participants, Wolf is curious about the shared experience of wearing a therapeutic device and seeing a colleague, friend, or co-participant doing the same.

The objects are each approximately six to eight pounds and their collective weight is equivalent to the artist’s. This is a personal offering of labour and body. And why blue? As writer Rebecca Solnit explores in her exquisite A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), blue “is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire.”