Midyear Studio Check-In

Yesterday, I visited my friend Thomas Sayre’s studio.  My friendship with Thomas is something I’m so grateful for – we crossed paths not long after I moved back to North Carolina.  I’m always moved to be in his studio. Tools, steel rigging, vintage filing cabinets full of well-organized ingredients for making line the walls.  Evidence of elemental making are all around –  marks of fire, earth, air, water – beside very organized lists for hardware store runs and cleaning schedules for industrial machinery. 

           I allowed myself a moment to dream on return to my cramped little office. All I really want is a long, industrial table for collaborations, spreading out large-scale ideas and a studio assistant.  Even just part-time.  Right now, I cannot even SEE the green surface of my desk.  On the floor, stacks of notebooks and papers are separated into projects untranslatable to other humans.  Striped bolts of fabric from my collaboration with Bernhardt design line a corner and make opening the storage closet a circus balancing act.  Amps and instruments hide under the Wurlitzer or at very stages of repose between the last gig and the next one.  Found objects from an old motel spill from an overstuffed cardboard box.   On the wall to the left, a giant calendar and tiny magnets holding up drawings Jean has made for me and information I don’t want to forget.  On the wall directly above my desk is the paper sketch of an album I’ve been working on for a long time, an incomplete map, an intricate start.  

There’s a lot of action in that office;  so much mess that I’m writing now from the table in the backyard.  It’s been a very good, very busy start to this year.   Now It’s time for a studio spring clean; a look ahead to planning summer goals, a clean up so that my studio looks a little more like Thomas’s.  

People ask me all the time what I do.  Jean shrugs, “My mom’s an artist.  She’s always going to a meeting.”  My family says I’m definitely up to something.  I like what my friend Jack Sanders calls himself, an architect with an intentionally non-traditional practice.   I also like the very wise advice my friend Tressie McMillan Cottom gave me last week:  Don’t leave one box for another one. 

I’m a project based artist who centers care work and questions.  I am a musician looking for ways to participate in music that align with my values.   Cross-silo, independent collaboration fires me up. I believe in circles of care and the working form of the circle. I am a citizen public historian hoping to mainstream essential information and make positive change in North Carolina.  I am a storyteller exploring how my little life making my own way with my funny little daughter might make meaning in a big, loud world. I’m a single mom doing the artist hustle and usually really behind on the laundry.  I had no idea stepping out of the box of “touring musician” would bust the doors down in such a beautiful way, though I’m not always sure what’s next.  I’m loving every minute of it, and I don’t care what you call it.  But it’s time to plan summer and since this is a studio archive, you’re coming with me.

1. WRITE an introductory manifesto for a dream place-making project I’ve been working on for five years.  Our timeline and telling you any more about it depends on the US economy not collapsing in the next few weeks.  Burn sage, cross fingers, collect feathers.

2. SUMMER RESEARCH. This means thinking about next steps for the performance collective of care Rissi, Shirlette, Jameeka, Adia, Shana and Ganessa piloted together this April, which has all of my heart. It also means foundational reading and time in the archives preparing for a Bass Connections project beginning this fall at Duke around feminist pioneer Rosetta Reitz’s musical archive of care.  Who knows where this exploration will take us, but a few questions I am thinking about:  What would ethical streaming and care for musicians look like, especially in the age of A-I?  How are women – especially women of color – systematically uncredited for their contributions financially and critically by tastemaker and technology gatekeepers?  What can Rosetta’s letters teach us about our past and our present to interrupt the harmful patterns of the past?

3. SING OUT NC PART TWO.  How can women, not just singers, circle up to speak back to the damage NC’s state legislature is doing?  How can we highlight all of the incredible North Carolinians making amazing, progressive, meaningful marks across the state?  One of them is the incredible writer, mother, educator and activist Belle Boggs, read this article and follow her substack! 

4. FINISH A RECORD.  I decided yesterday that I could do this this summer, when Thomas Sayre asked me to collaborate on a project culminating in summer of next year.  Thomas and I have long been in conversation about work and questions, including how society is only as good as how it treats its most vulnerable members.  I’ve long wanted to convince him to explore the imprints human voice might make combining his elemental work and my loud lungs.  During the pandemic, he threw himself into huge piece exploring Paradise Lost and what it means to be human.  His images – made of air, burning, liquid, resistance –  opened a door for me.  In the year before the pandemic, I began exploring found objects from an old asylum as an entry point for asking questions about sanity and disconnection from reality in the modern world.  I have not wanted to return to the music world alone.  But if I test that work beside Thomas and his studio assistants as we collaborate on whatever we are making for next year, I have a safe place to close the circle while asking hard questions.

Maybe you would want to come along?  It should be really funny to see how far along I am in September.