The Summer Home Residency

A permission slip for staying close to the source

I had been doing what I often do when a pocket of time opens up: trying urgently to fill it with meaning.

Summer is coming. The academic year is ending. My first year at a new university is almost behind me. I have been looking at possibilities: travel, residencies, applications, research trips, opportunities that might open doors, or at least make me feel like I was moving toward something.

Ireland, maybe. Other places, too. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere meaningful. Somewhere that would prove, perhaps, that I was using the summer well.

And then, underneath all of that planning, a quieter truth kept returning.

I just want to stay home.

Not collapse.
Not disappear.
Not give up.

Stay home.

Make work.
Make paper.
Make photographs.
Begin again with my hands.
Unpack the boxes that have been waiting since last August.
Let my nervous system finally arrive in the place where my body has already been living.

Last summer was chaos for so many reasons. Then came the move. Then came the first year at a new institution, with all its learning curves and initiations: new students, new systems, new expectations, new forms of exhaustion, new forms of belonging. I have been teaching slowness, presence, attention, and embodied looking while also living inside a pace that often asks for the opposite.

So maybe this summer is where I finally take my own medicine.

Maybe the most radical thing I can do is not go somewhere else.

Maybe the work does not need me to be more impressive.
Maybe it needs me to be more available.

The pressure to make a summer “count”

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes when you are an artist, teacher, writer, freelancer, academic, parent, caregiver, seeker, or some combination of all of these. The pressure says:

Use the time well.
Make progress.
Apply for the thing.
Go to the place.
Generate material.
Network.
Produce.
Return transformed, preferably with documentation.

Even rest can become professionalized.

We talk about retreat, but sometimes we turn retreat into another performance of productivity. We leave home not because the soul is calling, but because we have absorbed the idea that elsewhere is where important things happen.

Elsewhere has its place. I believe deeply in pilgrimage, fieldwork, travel, residency, and the charged encounter with unfamiliar landscapes. There are places that call to us for real reasons. There are invitations that matter. There are journeys we must make.

But there is also the journey of staying.

The journey of making the table usable again.
The journey of finding the box with the brushes.
The journey of washing the jars.
The journey of clearing a corner of the studio.
The journey of admitting how tired we are.
The journey of letting the house become a place of practice instead of a place we keep passing through on the way to becoming someone else.

This summer, I am naming it differently

I am calling it a Home Residency.

Not because I failed to go somewhere.

Not because I missed my chance.

Not because I am retreating from my artistic life.

Because I am choosing to restore the conditions that make my artistic life possible.

A residency, at its best, is not only a location. It is a structure of attention. It is protected time. It is permission. It is a container where the work can come forward because the rest of life has been simplified enough for listening.

What if home can become that container?

What if this summer does not need to be organized around departure?

What if it can be organized around return?

Return to the body.
Return to the room.
Return to the worktable.
Return to the paper vat.
Return to the camera.
Return to the slow chemistry of light, silver, fiber, water, and time.

What I am actually longing for

When I listen honestly, I am not longing to do nothing.

I am longing to make.

I want to make handmade paper.
I want to work with wet plate collodion.
I want to experiment without making every experiment prove its future usefulness.
I want to follow the material intelligence of the work.
I want to let my home become a studio again.
I want to cook, sleep, sort, mend, walk, read, and remember what kind of life allows art to arrive.

I do want to go to New York to help a friend through surgery. That feels different. That is relational. That is love. And while I am there, I will see museums and galleries and let the city feed me.

But beyond that, the body keeps saying:

Stay close.
Stay simple.
Stay here.

And I am trying to listen.

A possible rhythm

I am imagining the summer in three movements.

June: Land

Clear space.
Unpack.
Rest. (a lot)
Take inventory.
Make the home more livable.
Make the studio more usable.
Ask what actually needs attention before anything new is added.

Not glamorous. Necessary.

July: Make

Paper.
Collodion.
Salt.
Light.
Water.
Stitching.
Tests.
Failures.
Discoveries.
Days of working with my hands without explaining the work too quickly.

The kind of making that does not yet know what it is becoming.

August: Gather

Look at what emerged.
Document the work.
Write.
Reflect.
Prepare for the fall.
Plan future applications and travel from a clearer place.

Not from panic.
Not from scarcity.
Not from the fear of being left behind.

From evidence.
From embodiment.
From the truth of what actually came alive.

A permission slip

So this is partly for me, and partly for anyone else who may need it:

You do not have to make your summer impressive.

You do not have to turn every open space into an opportunity.

You do not have to leave home in order to become more serious.

You do not have to exhaust yourself in the name of expansion.

You do not have to confuse motion with momentum.

You do not have to apply for everything.

You do not have to monetize, optimize, document, announce, or justify every season of your life.

You are allowed to stay home.

You are allowed to root.

You are allowed to make the conditions for the work before demanding the work appear.

You are allowed to choose restoration without calling it laziness.

You are allowed to let this be the summer when the nervous system catches up with the ambition.

You are allowed to trust the body when it says: enough reaching. Come back.

Staying close to the source

The more I sit with it, the more I wonder whether staying home is not a lesser version of the artist’s journey, but one of its deepest forms.

To stay with the ordinary.
To attend to the domestic field.
To let the light in one room teach you.
To handle fiber, water, chemistry, dust, and time.
To stop abandoning the life you have in pursuit of the life that sounds better in a bio.

There will be other summers for travel.
Other residencies.
Other coastlines.
Other applications.
Other beautiful chances to be elsewhere.

But this summer, I want to arrive where I am.

I want to see what opens when I stop forcing the door.

I want to make work from the ground I am actually standing on.

I want to remember that a life of attention does not always look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it looks like unpacking a box. Washing a tray. Mixing pulp. Coating a plate. Standing quietly in the same room each morning, watching the light move across the wall.

This summer, I am giving myself permission to stay close to the source.

And maybe that is the residency I have been needing all along.