This first blog post will be about my time as a visiting artist at St. Michael's Printshop (St. Johns, Newfoundland) for the month of April 2026.
This was my first international residency, and also the longest one. I wasn't sure what to expect at all, and was really nervous about so many things. Flying, getting through customs, understanding the metric system. Being away from home for so long, meeting new people, working in a strange new shop, if I was going to come across as ~normal~ and ~friendly~ to the Newfoundlanders. Come April 30th, I didn't want to leave the island and was trying to convince my wife to move to Newfoundland. (As I write this, I'm still trying to convince her)
My first proper day in St. Johns, a snowstorm came along and postponed my introduction to the printshop. I got a latte and pastry from Birdie's (first of many), then walked up possibly the steepest hill, icy stairs, roads, and the occasional sidewalk, to Sobey's. I don't know why I'm writing so much of this in detail, I think I just want to get it all down. Will edit this several times anyways. :)
I had some very loose plans for what I was going to make. I had (of course) changed my plans several times over between the residency acceptance notification and the residency itself. A week before the residency, I had started a linocut of a house structure, thinking it would be a good book cover, or at least something to print in the first few days. I've been thinking about a deconstructing house motif for a couple years, as I grew up in a convervative & evangelical household and am in therapy to untangle (deconstruct, ha) it all. I tend to ruminate on the past and hold a lot of regret over what I did and said as a "devout Christian" (honestly, also holding regret over many things I do and say as a non-Christian). I feel haunted by burned bridges, former relationships, memories, and repressed emotions. I was thinking about an absurdly fraught relationship between a house and its shadow. A house that's scared of its own shadow, a house that wants to get away from its shadow. A house that wants to compartmentalize its residents and ghosts.
A welcome and bright aspect about a residency at a community printshop are meeting the different folks working at the shop. I have some social anxiety (getting better every day, mostly!) and felt immediately welcomed by everyone I met. Marlies Rise, Emily Pittman, Brenda Mabel Reid (and their partner Lacy!), Julie Clapperton, Oscar (edit! add last names), Dierdre McGuire, Christine Koch, Irena, Bruce, Daniel, Noah, and so many people...getting to talk to them about their work (Emily's litho fabric quilts! Brenda's family quilts! Julie's dead birds!), their lives, getting to just work alongside artists, surrounded by art, passing ships, and seagull calls.
Many essential aspects of the finished artist book came from the St. Michaels community, quite literally. I took pictures of so many folks' hands. Marlies was the first person I asked the question: how she would handle a ghost. She made this really lovely pinched gesture, and I was so excited about the response/reactions that different people would have. The shop also sold so many gorgeous papers, one being a fibrous, translucent red that translated really well with hands (and solved my worry about the back of the prints showing as you turned the page).