On Being and The Studio was commissioned by Graham Lister for the catalog accompanying his exhibition Fragments and False Starts at Studio Pavilion in Glasgow in 2023. It was funded by Creative Scotland. The issuu publication can be downloaded here.
On Being and The Studio
Windows to Freedom / Taking a Chance on Change
I no longer have a studio in the traditional sense of the term—an enclosed, dedicated workspace for the emergence of my artwork. I gave up my last studio, a small space I held for about two years in downtown Columbia, Missouri, in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic hit the American Midwest.
Right before the lockdown, I snatched up a huge drafting table on Facebook Marketplace. It barely fit through my door and ended up occupying a third of the living room. I hammered nails into the table’s tilted surface and hung up my work in progress. While painting in the communal family space, my daughter and then-husband witnessed my creative process in an unprecedented way. I, too, gazed with renewed curiosity, contemplating the drafting table for unusually long periods of time.
Given the constraints of my two-square-meter table, I downsized my painting surfaces to 25 x 20 cm panels. As it so often does, my art helped me take unexpected developments in stride and adapt to change. In those first quiet months of the stay-at-home order, my practice evolved at a pace of three full “studio” days per week. I felt fortunate and was productive. There was freedom in being able to work from home and comfort in the presumption that this was a special, temporary situation.
A year into the pandemic, these circumstances no longer felt fresh and exciting. Something needed to shift. My work yearned to be liberated from its parameters—small scale, medium, and subject matter. Spontaneous oil crayon drawings on found paper remnants brought momentary relief. I undusted and painted coarse canvases I hadn’t touched in months and felt the exploration was worthwhile. Going through my photo archive, I felt lighter, motivated. Eventually, I got rid of the drafting table.
Yet limitations continued to strain not only my work, but also my day-to-day life and my marriage, which had been rocky for years. I remembered what I’d learned as an artist—to trust my intuition and resourcefulness, and to be open to new frameworks—and, in 2022, my husband and I divorced. Making art is a practice; it has conditioned me to continually recalibrate my evolving values with my daily actions. Throughout this familial crisis, I made space for the solid inner knowing I had cultivated: effort and risk brought growth and alignment if I met each day with thoughtfulness and care.
Resting in the Making / Making in the Resting
If you’re an artist, your practice will be alive even in the most quiet or distracted times of your life. Hibernating isn’t death. Never doubt your creative self. We all go through periods of rest and reflection and periods of activity and inspiration. Why would our art-making be unaffected by these cycles? Not-doing is also empowering. I have found that a hiatus always brings me to a refreshed outlook on my work, a greater awareness of alternative solutions, and a matured sense of self.
I still work in my living room, making art sporadically at night or on the weekend with whatever I have at hand. In a feverish few weeks last summer, I created an entire body of work while my daughter slept. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, I repurposed old monotypes and byproducts of my 2020-21 oil painting process, pairing them with spontaneously created watercolor studies. To this day, these twenty or so collages remind me that everything is always possible.
Often, only very few intentional moves are necessary to create meaningful work. This unrushed, meditative stance on life and being an artist has been transformative for me. I now prefer to wait, patient and observant, for the right conditions to be in place rather than depleting myself by frantically working against all sorts of obstacles.
Since that drafting table entered and left my life in 2020, I’ve spent a lot of time in the now-expanded studio of my body and mind. Letting go of the expectation to create physical works of art has allowed my intuition to grow and strengthen while opening up an internal space for images to surface and guide my daily life. These images, relevant on a personal level, may not be ones I draw or paint, but I sense that they are and will be important to my creative practice.
The Infinite Studio / Cultivating Fertile Spaces
My expanded studio is the internal space where ideas and visions emerge. It is where I feel the excitement for new artistic endeavors and the urge to handle specific materials. My expanded studio extends beyond my so-called borders and encompasses external, public places as well: the street and the woods where I wander and wonder, letting my feet, perceptions, and reflections flow and guide me. In my expanded studio I read, travel, daydream, and talk with friends; I cultivate space for my subconscious to make the connections my conscious mind can’t. The expanded studio is in my sketchbook, my phone, and my backpack, too—the material archives that help me make sense of patterns, trains of thought, and the things I value.
The expanded studio holds unfathomable space. Here there is room for the anticipated and the unexpected, the satisfying and the shattering. After a few years living and working in my expanded studio, there is much I have learned. Sometimes, my creations seem tentative, fragile, and unsure of themselves, but missing the mark is just as powerful as hitting it. I’m grateful for both successful and unresolved moments. They are equally important. Both moments can teach me, and both moments contain deep beauty and richness when I allow my loving gaze to touch them.
Inspiration and guidance often come to me in states of ease, surrender, and bliss. I have learned that I tend to fall into such moments when I regularly rest, meditate, move my body, and immerse myself in nature. When I am able to quiet the thinking mind, I make space for authentic, carefree, and unburdened play, which in turn allows for discovery and innovation to arise.
The true wonder of the idea of a contained, physical studio and the reality of the many spaces art can emerge or be cultivated in reflects our own inventiveness. Precarious circumstances have shown me that the world, inside and out, is my studio; when I open myself to the possibility of creating in any moment, the external circumstances I need to make art expand indefinitely. Making art teaches that it is possible to hold discomfort and ease with the same equanimity. It reminds us of our ability to deal with change, of the concentration that supports freedom, and of the intuition and integrity required to constantly realign our evolving values with the lives we live and the art we make.