byrdcliffe Artist in residence series
After 12 years living overseas, I returned to the US in 2023. During the transition I lived and worked as an artist in residence at Byrdcliffe Woodstock, New York. Working with biomaterials, I started developing objects and installations to communicate shelter, interconnectedness, and innovative approaches to care and repair for our natural world.
Grounded and Winged
This installation acknowledged the wildlife and plantlife that have nourished this experience. A chorus of birds, cicadas, tree frogs, chipmunks, crickets, bats, and buzzing pollinators is constant background music. Deer, bears, polecats, and fox watch—some at a distance, others close among us. Cycles of mushrooms and wildflowers abound. The dense woodland shelters and shades us, all beings together.
Ecotopia Conversation
This outdoor installation was in response to Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) aand Byrdcliffe Colony architectural ruins during my artist residency, Summer 2023. Using dry stone stacking techniques, I used cast blocks of live mycelium — known for its remedial properties in ecosystems — to extend the stone plinths that once supported a porch off the front of Villetta, the main residence hall.
Thinking about the legacy of care and repair at Byrdcliffe over the years — founded in 1902 as a ‘textbook vision of a utopian arts colony,’ falling into disrepair midcentury, and it’s current reincarnation as a leading AiR program in the Hudson Valley — I’m interested in the unseen and unacknowledged labor it has taken for 120 years to keep Byrdcliffe relevant, a haven, and meaningful for the contemporary creatives who enliven this community today.
Materiality of Care
Working with biomaterials (mostly plant-based biodegradable ingredients), I developed objects and installations that communicate shelter, interconnectedness, and innovative approaches to care and repair for our natural world. Resettling life in a new place, this series was a meditation on what sanctuary and home mean.
This series title is inspired by Matters of Care by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa.
