“Artworking is an aesthetic midwifing of art as care where loss is intermixed with being humbled in the presence of birth and creation. It is a work of mourning that opens us to grief and its companion mystery.“ Bickel & Fisher, from Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal book
Dedication
Studio M* recognizes the arts and culture as essential healing terrains for learning and the restoration of sanity and nurturing the soul in the 21st century. Studio M* is committed to supporting thinkers, writers, artists, healers, teachers, explorers, carers and makers to join in co-creating a conscious awareness and creative responses to the precarity of our lives and world. Extending beyond the boundaries of any one geographic location it is a gathering place to explore ideas and creative impulses. It is dedicated to art and care-centered inquiry across differences and divisions.
Studio M* is a creative artworking always in progress. Clearly crises of all kinds are going to be the backdrop of everything we do. However, with wide-awakeness, art-care and co-creativity we hold the potential to transform and re-contextualize new pathways to a better world.
Inspired by Nature
We are giving ourselves
the freedom to be generous
giving beyond our comfort zones
within a healing and gifting economy
you are invited to explore this way of being with us
The “M” in Studio M* is in reference to the maternal relationality that is primal to all beings in the co-becoming of subjectivity in the Matrixial sphere. The * further extends the meaning of the M to multiple known and emergent unknown possibilities.
In 2009, we encountered “matrixial theory.” Theorized by Bracha L. Ettinger, an Israeli-French artist-psychoanalyst-activist and scholar in aesthetics, matrixial theory offers a transformative framework for reclaiming aesthetics and the arts from the destructiveness of the dominant phallic sphere. It offers a renewed understanding of the complementarity of the matrixial sphere, too long suppressed. The imbalance between the matrixial and phallic spheres has undermined the unfolding of a sane and sustainable world embedded in respectful ecological relations.
- We offer online classes, study circles, workshops and talks. See our Teaching and Happenings page.
- We have hosted short-term live-in residencies for artists, writers and scholars who want to study/create in a research creation lab milieu. We hold space for artists to evolve in a residency/lab experience on an individual basis. Contact us if this is of interest to you.
Studio M* operates within a gifting/healing economy model. Please see our Gifting page to learn more about how to support the gifts shared and to keep the circle of care flowing.
Studio M* 