June 15th, 2018 was a day of endings.It was my last official day as an MFA student at The Glasgow School of Art, the last day I would occupy one of the crumbling, but nevertheless endearing, studios in the JD Kelly Buildling on Hill Street, and my last day living in Glasgow, Scotland. And as chance would have it, on this night, following the school-wide graduation, a catastrophic fire emerged on campus, engulfing the famed Mackintosh Building, just as a £35 million restoration project following a previous fire in 2014 was nearing completion. Should any doubt have lingered, this was indeed, the end of my Scottish chapter. My subsequent studio move in February 2023 was considerably different for many reasons, the most obvious being that it did not involve a traumatic disaster. Instead, I quietly patched holes, repainted walls, and offered up a shrine of dried flowers, confetti, and prosecco to mark my departure. While less dramatic than my previous studio farewell, a sense of finality and termination prevailed; the move was ripe with ritual, ceremony, and all of the conventions I’d learned to associate with goodbyes. I had planned to leave Ojai and move to LA in pursuit of my art career, though I didn’t have much of a plan beyond the “leaving” part. And now most recently, in the first week of May, I moved again to a new studio in Ventura at Vita Art Center. Neither a scorched earth disaster, nor a chorus of fanfare marked this transition. To be honest, the move itself happened without much thought. I went through the motions and stepped into a new, gleaming space with the sort of routine indifference one has while washing the dishes. This wasn’t how I’d planned it— far from it. In the months leading up to the move I had envisioned a personally significant occasion with all the ceremony and obsession it deserved, but the Fates had other plans. Perhaps this was just as it needed to be for a shift that didn’t need to eulogize a moment or mark a new chapter. It simply needed to happen— a straightforward relocation centering on the act of moving in, rather than the grief of moving out. * * * * About ten years ago my mom and dad were driving through Big Sur and stopped to use the bathrooms at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. In nearly every way these facilities were aligned with your standard state park facilities: dank, dingy, ripe with the aroma of damp concrete and questionable sanitation. But one thing really set them apart. In each stall, displayed on a wooden ledge behind the toilet, stood a vibrant, cheerful floral arrangement in a discarded bottle. Each offering, a simple assortment of local wildflowers, seemed to glow with a decidedly counter cultural vibe, as though a long-forgotten hippie had placed them with a subversive and eccentric wink at convention. As my mom described them, they showed “whimsy without needing attribution.” They were a kind gesture to beautify a public pee place, celebrating beauty, community, and kindness towards others in the most unlikely of places. * * * * As I reflect on my current move, I find myself thinking a lot about those floral arrangements and the meaning behind them. My current studio is a far cry from a public bathroom stall, but there is much to do before it feels like home. In the meantime I’ve adopted some of the lessons from that anonymous bathroom beautifier. A happy-enough fiddle leaf fig now lives amongst new paintings, and I’ve installed a few pieces of art that I consider cornerstones of my artistic development. All of this is a kind gesture to myself, to make a space for myself, and with any luck it will also be a space for others, in the spirit of that impactful, big-hearted human.
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