Why Residencies?
It’s been a long time since I attended one.

They do present certain challenges.

Most of my adult life I was either a single parent of a child or a dog, neither of whom could attend residencies with me.

Residencies are available all over the world. They range from yurts and tree houses to resort like accommodations. You can find residencies on a working farm. You can find residencies in the mountains of somewhere. They can be as basic as pit toilets and tents and more glamorous than anything you live in.

Many, if not most artists, have day jobs that don’t accommodate the need to get away to attend to your “true career.” And then there is the expense!

Some residencies are free to the artist. Some residencies are as expensive as a semester of college. Most are somewhere in-between. Depending on the distance from home, the travel costs can add up. Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Is decidedly in between, but a beautiful three day’s drive for me with hotels.

After a long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains, I arrived here:

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Such beautiful vistas on this old farm…and cows…and Osage oranges.. The trees are everywhere, absolutely gravid with pebbly, green ”oranges.” The ground is littered with them. A plein-air painter told me that rule one is, “Do not set up your easel under an Osage orange tree.” In northern grocery stores these heavy things are sold for “decorative purposes, only.” Some signs say they are inedible. So, of course I had to look up OSAGE ORANGES on Wikipedia. It is an uber hard tree. It makes great fence posts if used while still green. If you use it all dried out, your staples and nails will not penetrate the wood.

It is a tree with few pests or predators. While the fruit IS edible, few animals or bugs eat it. When the softball-sized fruit is cracked open, it has a faint citrus smell and the seeds have the shape and moist gleam of orange seeds. But there appears to be no “fruit” there. The interior is all white fuzz and seeds. It doesn’t seem like a good distribution strategy for the tree! FDR planted thousands of them during the Dust Bowl to help change the climate and hold the land in place. AND…if that’s not enough, the wood, ground up to sawdust, makes a natural dye which I have used.

SO WHY AM I HERE?

I am here to challenge myself

Residencies have a way of taking you out of your usual studio practice, with limited materials and means, fewer opportunities for procrastination, new vistas. This presents a “forced creativity” situation. I am provided a fresh, clean studio, 3 meals per day, sheets changed once a week and a private bathroom!

I have been working for the last four months or so on finding ways to marry the digital technology I use for the textile work with the organic nature of my drawing practice. This residency is a continuation of that with a very specific target.

Just before I was offered this residency, I had just begun a series of sculptures that combine organic plaster forms with the digital textiles. It is slow going, messy and I don’t really know what I am doing. I have not used plaster in 40 years! So, I have one completed piece, a companion piece in process and couple more pieces planned. Then I was offered any amount of time in October to come to VCCA. I had only a few days to decide, write proposals that immediately came in, pay bills ahead, arrange mail, hotels, zooms and pack! Paper, muslin, off-cuts, paint, adhesives, a sewing machine, thread, tools…all the possibilities for works-on-paper.

I came to create a new body of works on paper

in response to new sculptures that are, themselves, decidedly still in process.

Scroll through and see some of what I did here!

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