Art Journal : Residency, Part I

I It’s been over a month since I started a project through a residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, so it feels like a good time to take notes and document this experience. Ok, I lied, it’s actually been over two months, and learning how to start again has been a notable experience this year.

I started January in great spirits with high ambition, aware that things would feel busy, but exciting nonetheless, and that I would make it work; alongside new parental responsibilities, a couple of ongoing reading groups, winter bugs, and a little postpartum brain fog… All of it seemed manageable until I felt… unwell. Read here a euphemism for absolutely-fu**ing-disgusted. If this writing aspires to be sincere, it should be said: January crushed me. In many ways. The events that unfolded day after day really took a toll on my health. First it was like being hit on the head, dizzy for several days, then sick to my stomach, unable to seize reality while trying to make sense of everything. It was the events themselves, then it was the gaslighting or the silence around them, either showcasing apathy or the inability to admit one cannot cope. I still wonder which one is worse.

That month, I didn’t meet any of my goals, barely able to pull myself together, recognized that I needed to pause, use my own tools to navigate this new reality, make space for discomfort, and start over. Of course connecting with others helped. Of course staying away from screens was necessary. Creation rarely happens in a state of suffering. If pain can serve creativity, it is in hindsight. Suffering seems to inevitably paralyze us. I didn’t see this paralysis as a failure at all, rather a proof of humanity, a proof of aliveness, something to cherish rather than hide. And when sensing ‘wasted time’, I quickly reminded myself of the duty and privilege, and therefore the responsibility, to be able to do that in the first place: it was probably the best and most meaningful way time could be spent, confronting our failed sense of humanity and ability to progress. I try to remind myself of the words of Audre Lorde: “Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification...”

So February started. Life was adjusted in a number of ways. I’ll focus here on sharing about my practice. Reading poetry helped. Writing what attempted to be poetic helped. Little notes here and there, because concentration and time were lacking, just playing catch up. Drawing, sketching, starting to sculpt again, getting back into movement, little by little.

Letting the hands lead when the mind is overwhelmed.

I thought a lot about craft itself and what it means to me, how central it is to how I appreciate others’ art, and how I want to develop it in my practice. Meditating on a language that brings ideas into the physical realm. Doing a residency in a place that was originally a print shop, and thinking about how many ideas, words, intentions, came to life and reproduced over and over, later dispersed in the world.

Paradoxically, focusing on craft, on the gesture, on the mark of a hand, made me realize how it is inextricably connected to an intention nested in the psyche, and an experience felt in the body as whole, mind included. That moment felt like experiencing Hegelian phenomenology (taking me back to undergrad years) in very practical ways. This connection with universal ideas that have sustained centuries is what always brings me back to philosophy: new (and endless) understandings of a lived experience. And so new shapes were built, more figurative stories emerged, with recurring themes of fragmentation (in thinking and practice), the body and the passage of time. My new challenge is now to connect more truthfully with words and images, emotions and forms, intentions and realities. I’m just starting to scratch the surface.

Nurturing the mind when the body is fatigued.

Reciprocally, I felt an urge to consume higher quality stories to lift my spirit up and cut through some very damaging cognitive clutter - a topic I’ve been looking at for a while, and one that ironically felt in need of attention. If I ever feel stuck or tired, a simple pull into a book by a trusted author will unlock something, a sentence that needs to continue, that synchronicity never fails.

This research process feels incredibly rewarding. If an image could summarize it, I find myself both weaving my own path and pulling threads, unwinding infinite stories and perspectives I never had the chance to focus on before. I am hoping that this practice can aspire to imitate the (feminist) idea that Ursula K. Leguin developed in her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where fiction can be container for life, for multitudes, not just linear vehicles for heroism:

‘The first cultural device was probably a recipient [...]. This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.

In aiming to create (or be) a container, I keep stumbling on literary gems like a perfect little crumb, like Marble in Metamorphosis by Rachel Cusk, a brilliant essay about how culture imagines permanence, fate and power through the material of marble:

What makes certain things last, while others decay and are forgotten? Perhaps what lasts is what continues to fit into the human story, what we can bend to our subjective understanding of who we are. For something to last we have to continue to agree with it, even if what we are agreeing with is something the lasting object never intended. Time strips an object of its context, revealing it for the achievement or mistake that it was, but what becomes of its intentions? [...]

By creating a lasting object, the artist takes responsibility for those who look at it, now and into the future. He believes he can communicate with those future people, and reassure them that their surmises about the world and its truth are the same as his own.

I also was energized by the words of Rebecca Solnit, author of “Hope in the Dark”, bolder and more lively than I have ever seen, presenting her latest essay “The Beginning comes after the end” about redefining global narratives based on how much progress has been made. Paraphrasing her, the future does not exist and only depends on what we decide to make with the present. Do not give away that power. Accepting doom narratives not only add to general cynicism, they wrongly relieve us from the responsibilities to act and create that future.

This passage resonated with a series I started building in 2025 on chrysalises and processes of transformation:

The beginning comes after the end. A chrysalis is the beginning of a butterfly, but in that chrysalis is no elegant transition. [...] In recent years, as we’ve paid closer attention to the natural world and learned more about it from scientists, this metamorphosis has become a metaphor for the transformation of society, often with the sense that we are at the stage of dissolution, imaginary cells under attack. [...]

​​There are many fragments to this mosaic of changes I want to chart, and underlying most of them is a shift toward the idea that everything is connected, that the world is a network of interrelated systems, that the isolated individual is at best a fiction, and that the natural and social realms run more on collaboration and cooperation than competition.

Even if I hear the argument of creating as an act of resistance, I sometimes grapple with the meaning and the privilege of an art practice in such a world, only to realize, once again, that because it is a privilege, it is also a responsibility.

So here we are, and this is what to expect in these art journals until the summer: the input into my process, my carrier bag (with lots of quotes and a growing bibliography), and the output in the artifacts. Starting again (and again), with a clarified process in mind, a more grounded sense of direction, but also an acquired taste that the process is the goal itself. Trying to keep the momentum. Taking it up a notch. Being gentle with ourselves while taking care of our communities - IRL. Leaving imposter syndrome behind in a world made by imposters. Choosing hope, a word that feels overused, but really Solnit’s euphemism for: “Never fu**ing surrender”.

Bibliography:

Essays

‘The Beginning Comes After the End, Notes on a World of Change’, Rebecca Solnit

‘Marble in Metamorphosis’, Rachel Cusk

‘On the Body’, Linda Nochlin

‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula K.Leguin

Poetry

‘What Remains: the Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt’

‘Sharks in the Rivers’, Ada Limon

‘The Hurting Kind’, Ada Limon

‘Balladz’, Sharon Olds

‘A Larger Reality’, Ursula K. Leguin