My Allerton Artist-in-Residence Diaries Week 1

I’m driving to Allerton Park and Retreat Center to serve as the Joan and Peter Hood Artist in Residence for the next three weeks, window down and relatively sunny as the seasons are starting to change. It took about ten trips up and down three flights of stairs to carry all the gear and necessities to the car. I have a pretty decent playbook for how this whole thing can go drafted in agendas and in my head, but also don’t want it to be predictable, I want indeterminacy, I want things to go off script. How does this work? Can we intentionally hunt for surprise? I think so. I’m bringing non-studio work with me, and it kicks into high gear on day one, so the first three days are busy, almost too busy. But when I arrive the night before I have this feeling of knowing I can surprise myself, and pull into the parking lot next to the A-frame building I’m moving into as it’s being circled by deer, moving in the darkness, just outside the periphery of the light, sniffing the ground. I come trundling in hoisting bags of stuff, and raccoons scuttle off under the fence-lines. There’s clearly a lot of life here, though it feels encapsulated in darkness. The ride in, you get this immediate sense you’re in a sphere of light created by the car’s headlamps and you’re moving as a single lighted figure through this landscape of darkness all around, which is simultaneously descending earlier and earlier in the day. It’s getting sharply colder. Then: that first feeling of arriving, of stepping out from that sphere and out again into the dark, sort of sets the tone for being here — it’s like you’re surrounded by this other life that keeps its own hours and you’re just passing through.