MacDowell Foundation Fellowship

I was honored to be selected as a MacDowell Foundation Fellow. I spent the month of August at MacDowell,  https://www.macdowell.org Foundation in New Hampshire, one of our country’s oldest and most prestigious residencies. The experience was generative and challenging, in the best ways—and this implies that there were hard days too.

MacDowell was special. I had my own beautiful house deep in the woods, Adams Studio https://www.macdowell.org/studios/adams, for those of you who know MacDowell. Each day a delicious lunch was delivered in a vintage wicker basket—protecting the artist’s time from distraction (and providing an extraordinary sense of being cared for). I pushed myself creatively and developed new collaborations with composers and writers. The experience was rich with experimentation and conversation and not a little insecurity. Every day, I divided my time between drawing and painting in the studio and working deep in the woods with found materials— experimenting with movement and performance, video, and found sound as I contemplated my place in nature, human’s complex relationships within the natural world and my own aging self.  The woods were thick with ancient trees, many long dead, giant standing skeletons.  I thought a lot about what it means to stay in one place for a very long time, like a tree, and witness the world coming and going. Human life is blink in the eye of those big beauties.  I considered the passage of time as well from the perspective of the small and short-lived plants and insects and imagined the billions of lives with whom I was sharing space, our lives interdependent, and so thoroughly in symbiosis, that we take it all for granted.  I look forward to sharing this work with you. I finished some works on paper and am still editing video footage of the performance and movement that I explored. It is thrilling and terrifying to be a beginner again!