Residency Road Trip Recap

May 2022

Last month I took my studio on the road and headed to Solomons, Maryland for a week-long residency at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center as part of their Artists in Action Program. I brought along supplies to make more of my Dozens series [a series of small 3D works created with the constraint of using the same base armature (a plastic egg) to begin each sculpture.] I liked this project for the trip because it allows for a lot of spontaneity in the creative process meaning the only major prep before the trip was gathering supplies and packing.

From my home to Annmarie is about nine hours (which is a pretty long solo trip for me, and something I’ve never done before!) I left around noon and drove a little over four and a half hours to Pittsburgh (thank goodness for audiobooks!) I stayed at a boutique hotel called Traveler’s Rest which had a lovely great room to hang out in after I promptly locked myself out of my own room. 😂

The next day I hit the road early for the second part of the journey, which was another ~five hours of driving. I arrived at Annmarie in the afternoon and was quickly checked-in and shown the artist house (where I would stay for the week.) Once everything was unpacked at the house it was time to set-up my studio space.

The cool thing about the Artist in Action Program is that it takes place in their Arts Building, a beautiful open space where visitors can stop by and watch the artists at work. After I settled into my space and began working I had the opportunity to chat with visitors about my process and give live demonstrations.

The first step in my process was to cover the egg forms I’d taken with me in paper clay. This creates a base for building up more features. A new approach I decided to try out at the residency was using a pasta press to roll out the paper clay in thin sheets. I’d seen this done before with polymer clay, but wasn’t certain if it would work similarly with the paper clay.

Fortunately the pasta press approach was effective (check out the video below for proof.) This made getting all dozen eggs covered a snap, and soon I was ready to begin the sculpting process.

Two characters that emerged during my process were a bearded gentleman and man in a hat. You can see their rough stages in the image above. Other characters I created included a chicken, hamster, and ramen with a fried egg on top. While creating the characters in this series I tend to make decisions in the moment. I like to call this “creative play” because it is a way to get out of my head and create something more freely without the usual intensive planning that goes into one of my prints or watercolor illustrations.

Writing this at home post-residency I’m a little saddened that finishing these sculptures has taken a backseat to some more time-sensitive creative projects, but I’m excited to work on refining them more in the future.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the sculpture garden itself (which was a huge source of inspiration!) In addition to spending time walking in nature every morning and meeting some buddies like the tree frog pictured above, there was so much art to take in! My favorite things to come across were tiny fairy houses which were scattered all throughout the grounds.

On my final day I switched over from sculpting to painting for fear that anything made of clay wouldn’t have enough time to set and would be too fragile to survive the drive back home (by this point I’d exhausted all three of the batteries I’d brought for my cordless heat gun.) I had two sculptures that were already dried, sanded, primed, and airbrushed for just this purpose so I began filling in their details until it was time to wrap up and head to my final stop (an Airbnb where I would rest-up for the full nine hour drive the following day!)

I’m so happy to have had this experience and very thankful to Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center and its staff for the opportunity. While traveling so far alone was way out of my comfort zone, participating in an artist residency has always been on my “professional artist” bucket list (yes, there is such a thing.) As someone who has been known to take a week’s staycation from work to dedicate to artmaking (and ended up doing 50% artmaking and 50% household chores) the distraction-free time to really focus while in an inspiring environment was incredibly valuable.