How do you connect to the earth, but also to the world?
Making space for creative work while looking for connection
So, I finally broke down and rented a place in El Paso. I’ve been commuting from my dreamy desert house in New Mexico for over a year now and the strain of those 200 miles a day has been a constant presence in my work and relationships. I’m now in town during the week, then out in the desert on the weekends: I am sleeping more than I have in a while, feeling my body get used to the strangeness of rest. It hasn’t been an easy transition—no move is easy—but it is a move intended to offer me space for my writing, which has been a struggle to maintain alongside my daily commutes and heavy work weeks.
A filmmaker found this Substack and wrote to me this week: “I have worked in and had many studios, mainly film, television, radio, voice-over, and editing studios, and I have visited probably hundreds of places where visual artists work,” he writes. “The common quality to me is that they are all safe spaces. When you’re about to go on the air for a TV broadcast and you enter the studio, it becomes a place that protects you and keeps bad things from happening. Everything will be all right. In my own life I have felt safest in my studio, whether it was a loft space in an old building or the freestanding building I now have behind my house. Every artist I know shares that same feeling.”
I love this description of the studio as being a protective place you can step into, almost stepping out of the world, a safe place in a fraught time.
Last week, I re-connected with two close friends, and we spoke about the changes that have happened in our lives since the beginning of 2020. The deep changes that linger, the superficial changes, the changes in priorities and ways of being. What has changed for you?
For me, it is my sense of trust. I feel more pessimistic about human connection and mutual support than I ever have before, and this deep sense of dissociation certainly challenges the ways I work and live. I am struggling to build and maintain deep connections while also remaining vigilant in my self-protective cocoon. Obviously, connection is complicated (aka impossible) when you are used to being in a defensive crouch. I know, I know.
Counterintuitively, the first year of the pandemic was a productive writing year for me. The only structure in my days was my writing time (or studio time, we might call it) and, in a sea of uncertainty, putting some words on a page seemed easier than in other lives I’ve lived. Self-protection generates creative time and freedom? Perhaps… And yet, this goes against every political instinct in my body, which insists that collectivity is the way. And so, here I am in El Paso, looking for kindred spirits, finding time for writing. Apparently, I want it all.
I met the filmmaker who wrote to me at a small gathering at the Museo Livermore, a house museum dedicated to the symbolist painter Annabel Livermore. Created by sculptor Jim Magee, the Museo honors Livermore’s extensive legacy, preserves her work, and centers a series of paintings about death and the afterlife titled The journey of death as seen through the eyes of the rancher’s wife. The installation of this series, in particular, is striking. Installed in the round, the room is painted a deep saturated crimson. Benches in the middle allow a 360-degree view. You can feel the sensation of leaving the world as you follow the story cycle of a death. It is a powerful, magical space, liminal in its subject and its feeling.
At my home in the desert, I feel at once connected to the earth and also outside the world. My garden is blooming now, the riot of roses and irises splashing color across the little plot. I saw my first hummingbirds arrive last week, and the sounds of birds are a constant cacophony.
In El Paso, I sit at a table and write today, grateful for the mental space, the rest, and the financial stability that comes with this decision to work in El Paso. The yard outside this little house is filled with weeds and rocks: my dog refuses to walk in the yard, because her paws come out with so many thorns. She insists on sidewalk, instead. So, here, I am disconnected from the earth, trying to make space to reconnect with the world.
In my writing group today, a friend observes that so many people in her life are also in states of radical transition, looking for steadiness and finding ways to reconnect to their creative work in this strange time. Likewise, in my small circle, there has been unexpected loss, big moves and job changes, breakups. Things seem unsteady, under re-consideration, life seems fragile.
The thing that you might never know at the Museo Livermore is that Annabel’s supporter, Jim Magee, is also Annabel. It’s an open secret, part of Jim’s extraordinarily prolific multifaceted practice, that Annabel is him, her work a branch of his practice kept discrete from his monumental work in West Texas at the Hill. I admire his decision to build a museum for her, a way of independently ensuring that she would be taken care of, no matter the state of the world (or the art world) around her. And, simultaneously, he is looking for ways to connect her work to viewers, to invite community to support her practice, to be in dialogue.
I feel this pull also, and I wonder if you do too. How do you build the kind of time and space that allows your work to flourish, and how do you also find connection with others? What big decisions have you made to support your practice, and how are you building, maintaining, and caring for your communities? Is it possible to have it all? How do you connect to the earth but also to the world?
Maybe I’m mixing metaphors here, but maybe you also understand what I’m working on. My inbox is open… send me your stories and reassure me that it’s all possible…
With warmest wishes from the desert,
LA
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Yours,
Laura
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is the first full-time Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.