Seed: A Living Dream
Pritzlaff Conservation Center Gallery, Santa Barbara Botanic GardenExhibition on view December 7th 2024 - June 8th 2025
A cross-pollination between science and art, the exhibition celebrates the strange beauty of seeds, featuring micrographs from the Garden’s seed bank, paintings from local junior high students, and large scale ceramic sculptures by Rosie Brand.
More information at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.
You can read Field Notes from the Studio, an essay about the making of this show on substack.
Seed: A Living Dream
Field Notes from the Studio
A zine to accompany the exhibition at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, risograph printed with Bird in Hand Press, December 2024.
Read an excerpt of the essay in this zine on spiderhands.
Studio Ceramics, 2023-2024
Selected small sculptures.
worm school
Worm school is an artist collective with Ako Castuera, Iso Marcus, Rosie Brand, Josh Cloud, and Zena Segre. Visit the worm school directory here.
Our project began in 2021 by holding conversations, composting media that reflected an interest in craft practices, alternate futures, and reimagined pasts. Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble was a formative text for worm school, helping shape our practice as ‘earthworm symbionts’.
Our process is relational, iterative, and cyclical as we turn and crawl through the hot compost of this thick present. In our public offerings, we hope to provide space for the small and crafty worms, those who have been muddling away in the dark, wondering how to fertilize the future. Embracing Donna Haraway’s claim ‘thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers’. We facilitate reading discussions alongside material exercises for thinking hands.
Research texts we have worked with include: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Anna Tsing’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, Byung Chul Han’s Disappearance of Rituals, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and more.
Past Public Programming
The Infinite Worm: worm school in collaboration with The Infinite School.
Julia Haft Candell invited worm school to present our discussion framework at ‘The Infinite Library’ at Pitzer College Art Galleries in Fall 2023. ‘The Infinite Worm’ was the resulting collaborative happening, a spacious, lively enactment that brought first year students into process and play with artists from Los Angeles’ diverse clay community.
The Infinite Worm project appeared again at The Infinite School in Los Angeles during spring and summer 2024. Worm school facilitated a multi-part series of online and in person reading discussions with material excercises, including string figure games, net-bag knotting and clay node making.
Creepers Zine, Volume I
Peapod PressCreepers Zine is an exploration of the magic of invertebrates. A collection of drawings, thoughts, comics investigating fear and fantasy, beauty and disgust, enchantment and horror.
The graphic short story Spider contained in this zine also appeared in Air/Light! Magazine, Issue 10.
