This series of images taken on the Island were mostly about seeking space. I have always been drawn to birds who have the freedom and the expansiveness of the sky. Seeing these birds in flight I felt my own longing for that kind of flight and freedom.

The photo evoked bleakness, but also a sense of stark beauty. The birds aren’t centered; they look like they’ve been frozen in the middle of an exodus towards the edge of the frame. I’d sum the image up in one word: leaving. I was focused on the birds, so the lines with the avian imagery like “this town would surely be deserted if not for mourning doves and crows,” were birthed from images that came to me of these old-timers perched on their barstool roosts. Humans have always envied birds for their flight, but I think it’s deeper than that. For me, flight represents a freedom from ties, the ability to escape. That’s something I think we’ve all felt the urge to do at one time or another. After I settled on the influence of the birds, I simply fleshed out a back-story populated with characters that are rooted in place which envy one that wants to take flight.

In the song there was a sense of longing, searching for purpose in a weighted sort of weightlessness way that made me want to arrive at a destination or a decision. I felt longing and discovery, weakness and strength, awareness and heartache. I wanted to convey the distinctive moody tone I felt in the song, which was dark and intimate and gave me the feeling of both being inside and outside. The idea of painting on a circle was my immediate response to the music because it felt circular to me, like you were going to arrive back at the same place where you started from. The chair in my image symbolizes home and waiting to return. I titled my work “Compass.” The stars are often used for navigation, to find your way home. The dangling piano weights represent time, like a pendulum. Vertical time instead of horizontal.

The essence of the song for us was a sense of impermanence and nostalgia. We chose to approach our choreography without a literal interpretation of the lyrics, so after listening to the song many times, we put it aside. We performed the dance and edited the video without the music, and then added it back in at the end of the creative process.

We got this idea of a relationship through time and the idea of leaving. We decided to film different passages back and forth through the frame with various meetings and fadings in and out characters representing impermanence. It seemed like there was an autumn feeling to the song, which is why we used sepia tone. We used the appearing and disappearing characters to explore the duality of identity acknowledging that we’re not always just one personality or emotion or entity and that we are complex and can have many feelings at the same time. For example, the sentiment “should I stay or should I go?” Our passage through the frames could be a metaphor for different memories or dreams or projections or thoughts or fantasy. At the end, at the table, there is finally a sense of place and a rustic elegant sensibility to it but then even that is impermanent and disappears around us.

Seeing the painting I felt the deep space of night and the aroma of summer flowers. I felt a musical connection with the guitar strings and the birds in the background. What inspired my imagination most were the reds of the carpet and chair, inspiring pomegranate, and the deep midnight sky with its full moon and serenity yet wakefulness. I imagined this painting is of a place where one would go to think deeply and creatively – a late evening creative space.

About The Tea: The tea evokes the Deep space night and aromas of summer flowers… A euphoric feeling merging the visual of the stars and deep red colors with a musical connection with the guitar strings and the birds in the background. I opted for ingredients based partially on the colors of the painting, but the wakeful properties of Yerba Mate helped to fulfill the wish for a creative energy giving substance without actually having caffeinated tea. The reds of the carpet and chair induced a luscious flavor feeling, the deep midnight sky and full moon serenity yet wakefulness. Ingredients: Rooibos, Yerba Mate, Hibiscus, Pomegranate, Rose Petals, Stevia,

n the silence of this film I imagined I could hear the crunch of snow underfoot. To me the film was about random acts wehave no control over but that have a profound impact on our lives. The film made me reflect on choices and their consequences, on others, and us as we walk through life. I felt hope and acceptance around those consequences. I titled my sculpture “Dancefloor” which was inspired somewhat by the Australian Aboriginal tribes (like the Pintobe and the Walperry) who make three dimensional dance floors on flattened earth, then place clay balls and shapes, colored with pigment, in a significant pattern to describe an event. Then before the sunset, they dance the shapes into oblivion.

I ​was responding to the sense of wide open, unrestricted spaces in a lot of the artwork, but since I couldn’t make my space any bigger, I was drawn to make a space that was about the desire for wide open space — it is somewhat closed off, with an enclosed ceiling (probably a lightweight fabric-and-framework). You’ll have to duck a little to get in, after which the ceiling slopes up drastically to a wide opening, backed with a strongly lit fabric scrim, to give the effect of the sky we’d all like to escape to every once in a while. The tea, plus the narrative in the song, made me dwell a little on the comfortable domesticity that keeps us stuck, so I arranged some comfortable, if slightly ratty furniture around the more interactive artwork — the sculpture, music, and tea. The whole configuration accidentally ended up being a little nest-like, so I put a little emphasis on that! One of my strong connections was with swallow nests, in barns but mostly dug into the sides of cliffs — in my space they became niches, (or nests,) for teacups in a range of scales. There is also an accumulation of discarded and broken cups — those swallows sure make a mess! — because it’s sometimes the accumulation from our day-to-day habits that drives us to escape.​