Katharine Spilker

PLAYA Summer Lake Artist-in-Residence

March 5-12 2022, Summer Lake OR

Excerpt from website:

“PLAYA’s residencies are open to the global community of scientists, naturalists, biologists, musicians, designers, sustainability leaders, social practice artists, musicians, visual artists, writers, performing artists, and collaborations and individuals engaged in interdisciplinary work or other forms of creative work. PLAYA welcomes a range of participants– from emerging scientists and artists to those with an established history of accomplishment.

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Given a week at PLAYA I chose to experiment with some site-specific material investigations. Everyday I would spent time walking around the Playa, observing the landscape, feeling its pace settling into mine. The unique textures and colors were showing up in the the materials I was choosing to work with—mostly paper, strong, paint, chalk, plaster. By the end of a week what emerged felt like a series of reflections. In my material processes there was so much of the Playa landscape there—the salty encrusted dirt, the sage brush, the changing sky, the cracked cakes of mud—it felt like my work was trying to replicate or merge into pieces of the landscape. It felt right by the end of the week to see how these pieces behaved in the environment that they were born of—both apart of it and something foreign and unnatural, not made by earth’s touch itself but a human hand. Throughout the day, I observed the changes in relationship between the pieces I had made and the spaces that they were being changed by, trying to understand the temporary conversation, something I’m still listening to.