In December 2025, I attended the Ragdale Residency in Lake Forest, IL for 18 days. There I worked in the studio on collages, small and large, that incorporated elements from this Arts and Crafts Movement historical house built by the architect Howard Shaw. The estate has many houses on the grounds, including new contemporary buildings such as the dance and music studio. Each house features big fireplaces that prove very useful when it’s -22 degrees celsius outside. I was in search of cold and snow. I got both! I loved the added interiority it created, a feeling I explore in my work. Printing on rice paper, using a bigger flat brush to drag the paint and create patterns, using colored pencils and painting with plaster on black paper were my main moves. I also started to teach myself embroidery. Far from my usual responsibilities, time stretched and I worked between 9 to 11 hours a day. When getting ready to go to a residency, or on a trip, I always have this fear of not packing the right supplies. I packed my acrylic tubes, ink, embroidery supplies, lots of paper, matte medium. However, I ended up ordering more paper and took a little trip to a Blick store to complete what I had. Restrictions can be frustrating of course (For example, it has been impossible to find a sewing machine and an ink jet printer, two essential props to my work), but it can also open up possibilities: mixing paint in a new way, finding more media interactions. I always pack something inhabitual in the hope that a discovery will happen. This time, my pastels helped. I used them to transfer, but also to create texture on a print ghost on rice paper ( a portrait of my brother). Being in a new environment, mining the place for meaning and connections, is also very productive to me. The snow receded during my second week and I discovered pods on the ground of the courtyard that I crossed dozens of times a day. The pods were huge, a beautiful maroon color, flat but twisted. I made rubbings of them to familiarize myself with them and then went on to making drawings and prints. I still have to research the name of the tree they come from, but what matters to me at this is their proximity rather than their botanical origin. I also took the time to read “Invention, Memory and Place”, an essay by Edward Said to whom memories of places are political acts and allow personal survival. I also spent time with painter Kerry James Marshalls writings and interviews in a book I borrowed from the Lake Forest library. The book documents early collages by Marshall and this gave me a little boost to explore my own collages in a more spontaneous way. I worked on defining different structures for the collages in the hope to shed light on different processes. Building a collage using the architecture of a room, building a collage back to front, building a collage based on a sentence (left to right) and such. More to come on that front.

Three of my works were included in **Permission, Slip** a group show celebrating our *“permission play, to wander, to step outside the bounds*” as Delphine Hennelly, our cohort mentor puts it. Our group of artists worked together for almost a year, meeting on Monday nights to discuss our practices, works, conduct critiques, attend virtual studio visits and meet with visiting artists. Was it a surprise that we were a group of women who all asked about this concept of permission, this far away land that sounds mythical and yet so close to the hand? Delphine asks: “How often do we, as artists, look outward for affirmation—for some external nod that says it’s okay to use ‘this’ color, to fracture the rules of ‘that’ composition, to stray from familiar forms of representation, to be abstract? Hesitating at the edge of risk, there comes a crossroad in every artist’s project when a vital need to reclaim a sense of permissiveness appears. Not as a borrowed privilege, but as an inner stance—one that cannot be outsourced. To assert this stance from within is to reorient one’s perspective. It is to remember that permission to give shape to thought, ultimately, is not a fixed point, but a shifting passage- a slippery road where freedom emerges through the very act of seeking.” The group show was held in Chelsea, at the NY Crit Club Gallery in July 2025. Other artists in my cohort were Joanne Boyle, Hong Yang, Rachel Siminoski, Alexandria Nazar, Clo, Carlisle Burch, Sara Jean Odam, Jane McKenzie, Joan Hanley.
List of works here - Image credit @flaneurshan.studio - on this image “*Inner Wall Study*” is on the top left

I am thrilled to be the inaugural artist of this new parent residency at the Pocantico Art Center (NY) this July. More info here

Marie B Gauthiez

@mariebgauthiez