Things I'm looking forward to
+ invitations to join
On June 28, shea in the catskills and I are hosting The Symbolic Lab.
The 2025 Symbolic Lab is a collaborative, online, arts-based research project around the theme of trust.
Each month, we take up trust—what is it? what does it feel like? how do we know? how might we cultivate + generate it?—thru the lens of that month’s theme. Engaging the tarot’s images + sharing what we find by way of creative prompts, we’ll invoke the emergent intelligence of the group to deepen our research + practice of trust together.
Each 90-minute gathering begins with a group check in. After framing our research, we’ll use images from the tarot and elsewhere to connect with our own experience of trust thru the lens of that month’s theme. We’ll invoke the emergent intelligence of the group to deepen our research + practice of trust together. The aim is not to arrive at conclusions, but to generate abundant meaning + nourishing collective spells.
Everyone is welcome, regardless of your experience with tarot or previous labs. Bring your curiosity, a journal, something to write with + a tarot/art deck if you have one. These gatherings are recorded; recordings are shared with all registrants for asynchronous participation.
Register for The Symbolic Lab: Trust in Care on June 28.
On July 13, I’ll be joining Martha Crawford for a Community Discussion about Arts Based Research as a Collaborative Practice.
For so many, especially those who do not identify as artists, art-making has been cut off from collective meaning-making activities. Arts Based Research creates a space for a collection of subjectivities, for spontaneous visioning and public dreaming, allowing synchronicity, non-linearity and complexity to lead the way.
Relying solely on language in an era where written and verbal communications are so subject to conscription, misperception and intentional distortion has intensified the collective alienation and isolation.
We are also able to find ourselves and each other through art and image.
I’ll be discussing how I incorporate Arts Based Reseach as a collaboration process that de-centers colonial communication practices such as argument, persuasion, debate, judgment, case-building, verbal sparring, defining, categorizing and opining.
Arts Based Research as a community practice allows participants to engage in a process that centers rest, silence, reflection, play, self-regulation, amplification, intuition, meaning making, and imagination and image and to hold these functions up as forms of power and ways of knowing.
To register for this discussion only, click here.
For those interested in accessing past and future Community Discussions, I highly recommend subscribing to The Whole Archive.
Art Process videos:
As a self-taught, intuitive artist, I learn so much from closely observing my own artistic process. I began recording my painting processes in 2023 and compiling timelapse videos of my making practices. I share these video processes to counteract the flood of distorted imagery we encounter online. My hope is that others find inspiration, enjoyment, and rest while watching my human hands make things. Feel free to subscribe, share and watch these videos on YouTube.
***
In solidarity & support, Elena