8 Comments

So good to see those tiny swatches of terroir stack up...

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Dec 6, 2023Liked by Joumana Medlej

Your work is beautiful and your inventiveness is inspiring. I will be doing a residency next year and I have already been thinking about how to shape it, what I want to focus on. Thanks for describing your process of creating from a sense of place (with all the riches and limitations that place has to offer).

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Dec 6, 2023Liked by Joumana Medlej

I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between Spanish oak woodland savannas and California ones from your pictures. Lovely and soothing landscape! The artist book colors are inspiring - I’m thinking earrings of lapis paired with a red-brown spessartine garnet.

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So delightful to read about your residency. It brought back memories of my artist residency at the Rensing Center in South Carolina in 2020. I felt like I should create something that was rooted in the place. But I struggled with feelings of not being productive enough with the time that was given, especially when I compared myself to what others had done while there. This was the first time I had ever stopped working to devote myself entirely to writing. In the end, nothing artistic came out of the residency. I learned that I was not an artist/writer...I only aspired to be that. I had mistakenly blamed my full-time job for preventing me from being creative. Sometimes I think that I should write about this beautiful, too real experience. The title would be Off Target, since I failed to reach the goal of the residency and landed somewhere else (perhaps a way more interesting place).

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