Sarah Peck is Lecturer in the Department of Photography at Stanford University. She’s an intermedia artist whose work centers art practice as a means to investigate connections and create community. Peck engages photography, video, performance, drawing and sculpture in her process. She is currently working on a feature-length documentary exploring the role of artist residencies in contemporary creative practice.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Creative practice is a constant negotiation between stewardship and disruption.  It uniquely affords its patrons and participants opportunity to plumb the depths of the internal and the external phenomena that shape and move us. Creative practice holds space for play, trial, error and failure. It is a process. At its most potent and powerful it is rooted in experimentation, communication, connection, vulnerability and insatiable curiosity. All essential aspects of growth and evolution.

On a daily basis most of us function within and around social, educational, professional and financial institutions that systemically suppress many of those integral elements of process. As artists, we must be diligent about making time and finding space for those processes to thrive- and we must remain engaged with them.  Artist Residencies are unique opportunities for us to organically and alternatively contribute and be nourished. Moreover, residencies provide space, resources and support so that we can explore and express elements of the shifting landscapes within ourselves and in the world.

For the past three years I have been gathering material for a feature length movie about artist residencies. This project (working title: In Residence) will serve as an exploration of residencies around the world and their role in contemporary creative practice. In Residence will be a source of information and support for individuals outside the realm of academia who share an interest in and commitment to using art as a means of creating connection and building community. It will be shared online and in connection with other residency related resources and information.

I highlight a diverse group of residencies and very much hope to feature a selection of unique spaces outside the US- where I live and work. ´ace interests me for several reasons. Alicia Candiani’s conception of the space as a bridge to unite creative practitioners from diverse backgrounds (national origins, religions, etc.) and link them to the local community in the city that she grew up in is compelling. The history of the residency and its contribution to a neighbourhood recovery process interests me, as does its honouring of interdisciplinary approaches to thinking and making.

Peck’s residence was sponsored in part by the James and Doris McNamara Faculty Fund in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University