MFA AC+D Candidate, Kara Cassidy Hall Artist-in-Resident at East Creek Art
June 17, 2019
Kara Cassidy Hall, a current AC+D second-year, is spending time this summer as an artist-in-resident at East Creek Art, a center for ceramics education! East Creek Art is owned and run by Joe Robinson, a 2019 graduate of the MFA AC+D program!
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Kara Cassidy Hall
My time at East Creek Art allowed me to launch a deep dive into the non-human stakeholders which reside there. I was able to research, observe and interact with many of the non-human stakeholders which reside there as well as read Decolonizing Nature by T. J. Demos, which examines several artists’ relationships with ecology, art and politics. I created an installation for East Creek which is a microhabitat (perfect for a micro-grant!) for various different entities including: native plants, native pollinators, snakes (garter snakes and rubber boas), hummingbirds, chipmunks, toads, lizards and various insects. I created "homes" and "facilities" for various stakeholders out of ceramic and wood and they will be installed once fired in the fall. These include snake/lizard houses (includes windows, an awning and a chimney), a bird bath, which doubles as a puddling station for butterflies (it looks like a miniature pool, complete with a diving board), toad houses, a bird house (collaboration with Joe Robinson) and various insect houses. Making these works challenged and developed my skills working with clay and I was able to construct my largest ceramic work yet, the Pool.