STUDIO UNSEEN
Studio Unseen
Building a studio practice outside studio walls
At a certain point in an artist's career, a studio becomes a necessity. But for most, that’s not the starting point. Securing an art studio is the result of steady growth and the perfect blend of circumstances. I’ve been on a creative journey for over a decade, spending the last 2-3 years actively pursuing a career in the arts. I’ve participated in numerous gallery showings, secured art grants, gotten selected for a residency and been hired for commissions…yet I still don’t have a designated studio.
From artist to curator to patron, the arts community tends to romanticize the studio. “I bet your studio is a magical, mystical place where the great unknown resides,” muses the art enthusiast, while the portrait painter swears “xyz will finally happen for me when I get my studio.”
Earlier this year at Swan Coach House, I met TK Smith, a curator who was intrigued by the idea of my banana leaf art. “Next time I’m in town I’d love to visit your studio,” he said enthusiastically. I furrowed my brow, surprised and admittedly confused. My mouth opened to speak, but instead of the “art bae” dialect I’d mastered in recent years, out came stammers. “Uhhhhh, wellllll…..?”
At the time of our meeting, my studio (aka my mother’s dining room) was sealed up in plastic due to a recent unearthing of asbestos. Even if we hadn’t temporarily relocated while the house was repaired, my energy had been mostly shot since learning I was pregnant months before (yes! I’m a mother now 🥰 more on that later). No new work was in the pipeline.
“Uhhhhh yeah…….yeah we can…we can definitely do that.” I tried to clean up my response, but by then, it was painfully obvious that TK’s suggestion made me uncomfortable. He patiently let me slop through my answer before leaning in and saying gently, “Your studio is wherever you’re at.”
“Your studio is wherever you’re at”
What is an art studio?
An art studio houses the tools of an artist's specific skill set. It’s the place the artist comes to execute a vision, to refine techniques, to muse. It’s the place that houses this tender, quiet love that binds the artist and their art together. It’s also the place that proves to curators and potential collectors that the artist is serious about their craft and that investing in them is a worthwhile venture.
What then, is a studio practice?
A studio practice encompasses the ever-evolving relationship the artist has with the tools, materials and muses they work with. A practice is the intangible dialogue that exists between the artist and their process, as well as the nonphysical space between each step in a procedure. Without that nonphysical space, the studio is lifeless. The studio is the body; the practice is the breath.
The artist who, whether by choice or out of necessity, finds a way to develop a studio practice outside of a physical studio, comes to understand which parts of their practice are informed by their environment, and which are the unyielding, personal creative laws that define who they are as an artist.
This type of artist does not need highly specific conditions in order to create, but rather is free to travel, explore and make works in real time that blend their changing environments with their personal creative laws.
The following reflections detail a few notable environments I’ve occupied over the past 12 years and the impact they’ve had on the emergence of my creative practice. These spaces were my unconventional studios, be it for just one day at Alligator Point in Florida or for 5 years in a New Orleans shotgun home. My studio practice emerged as I got intimate with the lands my heart led me to.
The Forgotten Coast
I never had plans to become an artist. I had a consistent writing practice the year before leaving home for college, but it was more so meant to cope with loneliness than it was to nurture creativity.
“I don't mind if I'm not missed once I'm gone, as long as I'll be appreciated where I'm headed,” I wrote in May of 2012, 3 months before my departure. Like bell hooks in Belonging: A Culture of Place, I “felt like an exile, as though I was being forced to leave the landscape of my origin, my native place because it would not allow me to grow, to be fully self-actualized.” Between familial dysfunction, girl group drama and cultural displacement, I was eager to leave it all behind.
In July 2012, I did just that. My mother and I stuffed my ‘02 Corolla, known as the Rolla, with my belongings til the back bumper sagged. From the prairie to the bush, we dragged my things to Tallahassee, Florida, where I had registered myself as a sophomore psychology major at Florida A&M University. I hadn’t visited the school or the city before moving. I just showed up, convinced that “Florida was calling me.”
Just as soon as I touched down in Tallahassee, it was on. My roommate, a Polk County native, ushered me properly into Florida culture, introducing me to sugar cane and showing me what it meant to be Paralyyyyzedddd. (It means you’re “so fucked up you can’t open ya eyes.”) I went to FAM, so of course I was drinking hunch punch. Of course I was at Top Flite and Colesium. Of course we went to Nite Kap at the Moon. Of course we were in Panama City Beach for spring break. That first year was a blast. But it wasn’t fulfilling. It didn’t satiate the hunger that drove me from my homeland in the first place.
As summer settled in, the university city became a sleepy little town and the icy truth of my solo cross-country move became more pronounced. I was as lonely as I’d ever been; only now that loneliness was intensified, without the familiar childhood backdrop of misty blue Rocky Mountains.
I started seeking out places that mimicked how I felt inside. Me and the Rolla, a gift from my grandparents, rode up and down Florida’s Forgotten Coast Highway, stopping through tiny beach towns and coastal forests, playing one of the loneliest albums to ever exist: King Krule’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon. Gloomy days were ideal because just after a rain shower, the likelihood of seeing other people significantly decreased. Gray skies made the sea look murkier; the pastel paint on the raised beach cottages more muted. A romance blossomed between me and dreary emptiness.
The ghost crab-infested waters of Mexico Beach became my studio, as did Highway 98, as did Wacissa River, as did the Rolla. I wrote songs and poetry; I took photos on a camera I thrifted; I read books I stole from my college library and befriended butterflies. I shed what I thought I knew about myself, my hometown, my future. The ocean caught what I dropped and washed it away, making room for a new sense of place to emerge. My inner space was collapsing and burgeoning at once.
The dialogue between myself and my creative heart was so tender and intimate, that the easiest way for me to hear it was in the quietest places I could find. In the presence of others, I believed the welfare of my creativity was threatened because I sensed they wouldn’t treat it with the same care I did. I was rejected from a well-known poet’s writing retreat because the way I wrote was too personal, “not shared,” she said. One writing professor flat-out told me my work made no sense. I can admit today that they may have been right, but at the time, my urge to isolate was a matter of creative safety.
The time I spent in Tallahassee traversing my inner world emancipated me from the limitations of my mind and left me tender and bruised. Life as I knew it was dust at my feet; ash smudged into my fingerprints. After graduating, I packed my ruins and brought them with me to New Orleans, a city that has long cohabitated with destruction. To live in the swamp — to share space with the water — is to oblige her, to ponder her laze and respect her rage.
Implosion
“Across the river” on the Westbank of New Orleans, a neighborhood named Algiers became my new home. The duplex I moved into had a porch raised slightly above the sidewalk and a weed-ridden backyard. Chocolate brown hardwood, 12x15-foot rooms and 10-foot ceilings gave the simple shotgun floor plan a stately grandeur. On breezy days when the wind swam through the front door and out through the rear, the house with its entrance facing East felt like a barge on the Mississippi. With second-hand items, found furniture and moody midnight blue wall paint, I constructed a dwelling from “whatever memory lived in the blood,” as Linda Hogan in her essay Dwellings put it. It was a place I’d never been, but remembered in my DNA, a cradle for my heart.
Though I’d socially isolated myself, a habit that intensified at the onset of the pandemic, I was kept company by the stories that live in the land, the secrets of the soil. “The plantation was surrounded by swampland where enslaved Africans held drumming circles, spiritual ceremonies, and even took control of their own freedom as maroons (Africans who escaped enslavement),” writes Cierra Chenier in her essay Algiers is very much New Orleans; was often the soil where enslaved ancestors first stepped foot. The lands remember the songs that reverberated through them; the heels impressed upon them. I got intimate with the flora and fauna in my yard and down by the levy — the camphor tree, wisteria buds, banana plants, damselflies — studying the ways they record and store history.
One afternoon I sat amongst a pile of dead banana leaves I’d trimmed after a spring tornado tore through the city. Though the leaves were dead, they found a way to tell me they had more life to live. The banana trees had stories to tell and historical information to share with humankind. They saw themselves as art and medicine, as messengers. They proposed that through my practice of interpreting the natural world, I had become the ideal vehicle for helping their limbs reach past their lifespan. As an honorarium, the plants offered the promise of abundance, vowing to provide for me always.
When isolation wore me out, I forced myself outside to find community. I landed in a friendship circle that embraced me, where I could unravel and begin healing my community-related traumas; where I could learn about the city through my friends’ stories of their childhoods and teenage years. I sat on the porch of the pink house with my elder neighbors Miss Gloria and Mister Joe, hearing about the ways my block (Atlantic Ave) had transformed since the 80s when they moved in. We listened to CDs of original music sung by Miss Gloria herself and talked about the new neighbors we didn’t like. I learned New Orleans through the orations of an obscure Haitian hoodoo man blasting John Coltrane’s Equinox from what was once the slave quarters of one the tallest houses in Treme. I learned New Orleans with other transplants who journeyed to the city in search of whatever was left behind by their predecessors during the Great Migration. It might appear, from one vantage point, that New Orleans is being eaten alive by big dollar developers and thickening violence, but the city boasts a steady understanding that its unshakable pride is the lifeline.
Inspired by a job I got in a wood workshop, I started getting gritty with my hands. I acquired some power tools and built a storage shed in the backyard, with assistance only from my neighbor’s 4-year-old, who helped with the gray paint job. I made my first indoor water feature using an old Wok, a pond pump and stones I collected by the levy. I started a vegetable garden and a compost pile. I went on to birth a design studio, Spatial Therapy, and completed my first big gig styling a massive enchanted bayou baby shower using live Spanish moss and fallen tree limbs. The seeds of my art journey were quietly sprouting and threatened to take up more space than I had available.
On the one hand, my creative and spiritual practices were expanding beyond what could be contained in the 780 square feet of my apartment. I felt suffocated. On the other hand, I had finally started to feel at home in New Orleans and could envision how to build something in a city that flirts closely and consistently with destruction.
After five years, I’d become a New Orleanian in the sense that I wasn’t threatened by a category 4 hurricane warning. So many false alarms come through the summer months that one starts to feel invincible. Algiers rarely flooded, so a sister friend and I decided we’d camp out at my place with her pit bull Coco for Hurricane Ida when most were advised to evacuate. We lost power the first night of the storm but still had a hot fajita dinner - word to my gas stove.
By morning, the wind had ripped my roof to shreds. By dark, my friend noticed water droplets dripping from the ceiling in my front room. Within 20 minutes of her announcing the leak, the ceiling gave in. Chunks of soggy drywall slapped against the hardwood. The ceiling in my bedroom followed suit. We tried to cover my brand new cream-colored couch with tarps. We tried to catch the rainfall from the gaping holes in my roof with buckets. But just as quickly as the ceiling opened itself to the night sky, we accepted that my space was no longer safe. We grabbed a few of our belongings. My friend leashed her dog. We emerged from my front door and braved the storm. Cinder blocks and shingles with loose nails flew through the black of night as we sought refuge two doors down at another friend’s house.
That fajita dinner is the last hot meal I had in my shotgun. Less than a week later (during which time the majority of the city was surviving without power in 90-degree weather, another story for another day), all my belongings were packed and headed to storage, I myself on my way to Georgia to spend some time with my mother in her lake house. Much of what I brought with me were recently acquired art supplies, things Spirit urged me to purchase just days before the hurricane. I was being set up for my own little storm-induced artist residency. In an audio reflection I recorded on the road to Georgia, I stated the following:
“Seeing the ceiling open up and spill its guts onto the floor felt like an implosion. It felt like something had burst.... I’m somewhat relieved because this shows me I wasn’t just talking shit when I said I’m outgrowing this space. I wasn’t just being a brat when I said I needed more privacy and more room to spread out. These were real needs, real concerns my spirit had. I knew what I needed and I’m now being put in the position to receive that.”
Inheritance
Despite the infinitely open skies of my home state, she purposefully closed her walls in on me, intending that I dream outside her box. Florida’s forgotten coast underscored my draw toward contemplating empty space, abandoned furniture and dead leaves. Louisiana was big sis, teasing me for being so timid and afraid, and simultaneously using her landscape to show me how lush and lively my life is meant to be. New Orleans gifted me the wisdom of soil, seed and self-worth, which if tended with care, can only yield exponential abundance. Deep in Georgia, my grandfather’s birthplace, my inheritance sleepily awaited my arrival. I couldn’t cash in on the promise of my riches until I’d surpassed a certain threshold in my discipline and maturity.
My mother’s lake house in Georgia is where my 12-year creative journey culminated in a studio practice that grew into the portfolio that secured me an arts residency. I spent two weeks at A Studio In the Woods in New Orleans [read the full recap]. I had the Zig Zag studio (the best one on the 7- acre property, in my opinion, named for the shifting lines in its construction). My beloved leaves draped the walls and spread across the floor. Sandalwood incense blended warmly with the citrusy aroma of the tung oil I accidentally spilled days after I arrived. In the afternoons I played Soulection mixes, and at night, Tame Impala’s Slow Rush B-sides & Remixes.
I spent the mornings outside, picking persimmons, cutting flowers, meditating with the trees. I asked the ex-tribal land [turned plantation turned creative retreat], “What do you need to feel vindicated? How can balance be brought back to this space?” The answers were dense, but suffice it to say, “land acknowledgment” is not enough. These conversations inform the silhouettes and the textures and the gestures in my work, notably the piece I made in the Zig Zag Studio.
Following my residency, I secured half a dozen gallery placements, an arts grant from the National Black Arts Festival, various commissions, the respect of my peers and the beaming pride of my loved ones.
From Colorado to Florida, Louisiana to Georgia; townhome to apartment, shotgun to lake house; I have managed to dig a sturdy foundation into an ever-shifting, undulating landscape. Studying the soil on which I live, fertilizing the land with the sediment of my spirit. The ground is my guide. What my hands grow varies with the given climate, but at all times and in all places, enriching the soil and nurturing self are my primary concerns.