Reading Studio, 2012

The Reading Studio, is an off-grid studio I built in the small town of Reading, Vermont. Vermont is where my maternal grandparents lived, farmed and familied. The studio was built on a 8' x 14' flatbed trailer or chasis. Materials were gathered from a combination of locally sourced, salvaged, and recycled building products. A series of short stories were published online at the time of construction and now exist in the studio archive.

I began building the studio in 2012, the year my grandmother, Helen Kaija, passed away. Building on the land that she spent her life was a cathartic experience that allowed me to spend time with her spirit. My earliest questions for the project, such as “what does it mean to be self-sustaining?” and “how to design more environmentally sound spaces for artmaking?” changed as I began to understand the limits of those questions. 

The studio was built in the summer of 2013 and just before its completion was accepted into an MFA program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. Thanks to the Kaija family, the studio’s permanent home is in Vermont. This project is dedicated to my grandmother, Helen Kaija.