photo Lauren Taylor

Joya: AiR / Isobel Atacus / GBR

Smatterings.

2. I'm in Spain. On a residency. There’s a large black dog and an honesty box for crisps. I don’t know if a week is long enough to produce something but, the feeling is generative and restful, and – well, I’m here, and I have lots of ideas about what I want to do, tying up loose ends and letting new connections grow, but I also feel like I’m trying to de-clutter and wherever I happen to be this is a constant sensation. It’s really good to be in a studio with only a few selected things. I remember something Adam Philips wrote about clutter although I’m pretty certain he was quoting something from Marion Milner but something about how we need clutter because in trying to find something through the clutter we might find something else along the way – but I don’t have my notebook with me to note down the reference because I brought a new notebook so that all my other notes wouldn’t get in the way and clutter up my week –

How matter gets in the way of –  well                       I know where this is heading:

What is the matter with clutter is matter the matter of clutter, its mattering and why does this matter the clutter that clutters my matter it matters and clutters

 Isobel Atacus

Encompassing sculpture and writing, Atacus’ work playfully questions the fleeting and ambivalent nature of interactions that take place in the physical realm. Stretching from the physical landscape to the intimacy of the domestic space, her practice engages with the objects and materials that surround us, upending ways we give meaning to things through re-describing their materiality in new ways. Dwelling on a frequent sense of a loss of control, my work often involves a form of exchange, subverting my own expectations of how materials might behave.

 Alongside this she directs an artist-run space, the icing room. She currently live in London, with ongoing projects in Lisbon.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Fernando Delgado Hierro / ESP

“I had a really immersive experience at Joya Air. In that unique spot between the mountains I had the chance to experience time in a different way. As Donna told me, the city disappeared from my face after a couple of days, and with it the sense of rush. I was able then to be focused and relaxed at the same time. My days flowed with inspiration, so I was able to be productive and calmed. At night I had a great time at the lovely dinners with the other artists (the exquisite food and the British sense of humour of the residents made a perfect combo). And of course I had the chance to meet Foufou the goat, to walk during the sunset, to pet a huge dog called Frida, to look at the stars (all of them), and to wonder among the trees until I found the perfect place to sit and think for a while. It’s been only one week, but it felt much longer, in the best way possible”.

“He tenido una experiencia realmente inmersiva en Joya Air. En ese lugar único entre las montañas tuve la oportunidad de experimentar el tiempo de un modo distinto. Como me dijo Donna, la ciudad desapareció de mi cara después de un par de días, y con ella la sensación de prisa. Conseguí entonces estar enfocado y relajado al mismo tiempo. Mis días fluyeron con inspiración, pude ser productivo a la vez que estaba en calma. Por la noche disfruté de unas cenas encantadoras con el resto de artistas (la comida exquisita y el sentido del humor británico fueron una combinación perfecta). Y por supuesto tuve la oportunidad de conocer a la cabra FouFou, de pasear al atardecer, de acariciar a un perro enorme llamada Frida, de mirar las estrellas (todas y cada una de ellas), y de vagar entre los árboles hasta encontrar algún hueco en el que sentarme y pensar. Ha sido solo una semana, pero la he sentido como mucho más, en el mejor de los sentidos”.

Fernando Delgado Hierro

Fernando graduated from RESAD in Textual Interpretation in 2013 and since then he has been working as an actor in theater with directors like Pablo Messiez, or in films like 'Pig' or 'The Rite of Spring'. In 2021 he won the Max award for best new author for 'Los Remedios', the first text he released. Later, with the Exlímite company, he premiered 'Cluster', which was performed at the Teatro Español, in the Matadero warehouses. He has also directed a production for the Spanish Theater, called 'El mal de la Montaña', with text by Santiago Loza.

Fernando se licenció en la RESAD en Interpretación Textual en 2013 y desde entonces trabaja como actor en teatro con directores como Pablo Messiez, o en películas como 'El cerdo' o 'La consagración de la primavera'. En 2021 ganó el premio Max al mejor autor novel por 'Los Remedios', primer texto que estrenó. Posteriormente, con la compañía Exlímite estrenó 'Cluster', que se representó en el Teatro Español, en las naves de Matadero. También ha dirigido un montaje para el Teatro Español, llamado 'El mal de la Montaña', con texto de Santiago Loza.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Celestína Minichová / SVK

“I am an transmedia artist focused on working within the realm of feminist urgencies. My deep interest spills over and extends at the intersection of eco  and xeno urgencies. While exploring these intelectual and linguistic phenomena from various angles I mainly try to "gazexperience"  and comprehend them though performativity, creation of sound-scapes and site-specific environments. I am constantly becoming otherwise together with other creatures of medianatures - here, there and in between with consequences.

My time at Joya: AiR was fullfilled with sharing, learning and horizons-expanding in contemplative, focused and joyfull space. Within a vertical cross section of globaly orientated artists I had the opportunity to peep into, experience and soak in other rich libraries of knowledge. I am grateful both on personal as well as professional level. This beautiful time stays with me.”

Celestína Minichová

Celestína is a Slovak intermedia art student studying for a a bachelor degree at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She works mainly within the media of site-specific performance art, language and sound as well as installation. Focusing on creating SF, imagining possible futures projecting them to the present times. She works with nature - roots, soil and at the moment stones. In August 2022 she had my first solo exhibition in Florence, Gallery Chiasso Perduto. Currently she is an exchange student at Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Jerusalem, department of Fine Arts. Performances include - Chthuleographies in Belgrade at G12HUB with Marta Jovanović, Earthly Talks in Prague at Petrohradská Collective, YES/NO in Bratislava at A4 with Klára Kusá, Preliatia in Bratislava at RARE with Katarína Poliačiková, collaborative project We (Shall) See at Kunsthalle Bratislava.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Josephine Cachemaille / NZL

“Joya: AiR is remote, a collection of beautifully rebuilt farmhouses, encircled by ambitious permaculture earthworks, projects with gardens and orchards, gray water filtering systems, and a semi-constructed freshwater modernist pool oasis. All of this is surrounded by dry clay hills punctured with wilding Aleppo pines, Quercus oaks, thistles, wild herbs, and heat.

My residency was during high summer, and the journey by bus to Joya: AiR through entirely unfamiliar landscape left me feeling vulnerable. The land felt exhausted: endless olive and almond orchards, White Poplar forestry blocks, limestone and marble quarries, and abandoned farms.  

While I had solicited the residency for the usual reasons - to disrupt my studio-based practice, to introduce new conditions under which to make, to shake the tree -  this vulnerability was still uncomfortable. 

My response was to turn to materials and processes that might connect me to the landscape, to make gentle gestures in the hope that this tough, gutsy place would become familiar and friendly.  I walked in the mornings before the sun was intense, picking herbs - crushing them, wearing them next to my body - and later under my pillow when I slept. I collected stones to make soft red and yellow pigments to paint calico, and mixed earth into clay to fashion into a surrogate arm and hand that I could lay down onto the thorny ground. I swam in the late afternoons to cool off and calm down.

The somatic nature of these actions nurtured conditions conducive to thinking through tender things. This approach opened channels of connection and attachment and gave me fresh, painful insight into the deep dependency I have on the non-human world. 

Everyone I met at Joya: AiR was brave, and while Joya is a retreat, a withdrawal from norms, it is also a frontier in which to venture out into unknowns”.

Josephine Cachemaille

For years I have approached materials as sensuous bodies with needs, desires and agency, but only recently have begun to understand that my making processes and the final assemblages themselves (often composite bodies and beings) kindle attachments and enduring affectionate relationships. My current work is concerned with nurture, care and healing. My practice has become an important site to explicitly hope and be optimistic; to cope with anxieties; and to form attachments and connections - with humans and non-human materials alike.

I work with a range of media to create installations comprising soft and hard sculpture, paintings and assemblages. The manipulation of these components and their relationships in the studio result in installations that function as psychological landscapes that I can examine, order, and arrange as I think through tender things, 

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AIR / Faiza Hasan / PAK - ENG

“Joya: AiR came to me at a time when I was feeling creatively stifled, when I needed the time and space to recharge and recuperate. Within a few hours of showing up, the dry, sparse almost lunar landscape, the intense heat, the rows of almond trees, the scent of wild mountain rosemary and thyme, all cupped within the towering mountains, made something relax inside me. I’d start the days with a trek in the mountains and valleys, when the sun had barely crested the horizon, through forests silent but for the chirrups of birds or a scurrying rabbit and was rewarded one day when a herd of Ibex, as startled by me as I was by them, thundered right past me.

My days were spent writing, the whup, whup of the wind turbine and the buzz of bees a comfort in the background, with siestas in the afternoons as the temperature soared. I’d bump into fellow artists in the kitchen over lunch and chat about what we’d worked on or complain about the lack of inspiration as Frida the dog padded up for cuddles. Evenings we gathered to watch the sun set behind the mountains, then tucked into one of Donna’s soul satisfying meals and talked late into the night about life, art and oddly enough - Jung. At night I’d go to sleep looking out of my window at a dome of glittering, star studded skies, one of the clearest I have ever seen.

My three weeks at Joya: AiR will stay with me for a long time. Not only did I manage to make great progress with my work, but I also met many fantastic artists, made many friends and felt that creative spark come back to life.

Faiza Hasan

Faiza Hasan has worked as a journalist for publications in the US and Pakistan, and has an MA in Journalism from Stanford University, an MA in Creative Writing from Cambridge University, and has been a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as the San Miguel Writers’ Conference. She also trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu and ran a pop up restaurant in London, then a bistro in Windsor and an online macaroon store, which she had to shut down due to a chronic pain condition, Fibromyalgia. She writes short stories and has just finished writing her first novel, The Ties that Bind Us.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Abbie Stellar / USA

“Just a few days into my residency at Joya: AiR, I suddenly felt the expansive yet short timeframe of two weeks. In the best possible way this situation of facing time, with so much room to observe, make, and rest was what I hoped would revive me and my excitement towards making work. Time felt like the wind, or like the traveling of sound. Sometimes it was a whisper echoing with the sound of the dry, crispy grass. Other times it was strong and gusty, reverberating through the valley with gusto. While at JOYA, I took time for myself and thought about my art practice, allowing the wind to take me where it would. I reconnected with my work with determination, joy, and ideas. I made new connections with an unfamiliar landscape and with people living (both permanently and temporarily) in that space. I found familiarity and embraces as I ventured into an unknown timeframe. This not knowing allowed me to explore and be curious about forms I’ve encountered both in nature and in domestic space considering their relativity to one’s own memories, while further investigating markings of time through my artistic practice. By the end of my residency I felt better acquainted with time in a way I hadn’t felt in awhile. A sense of knowing there is time, yet making the most of it when it's present; not feeling the need to constantly go unless that’s what feels right. Kind of a lot like the wind”.

Abbie Stellar


Abbie Stellar is an artist currently based in Austin, TX. Working primarily in sculpture, her work engages with ideas of the familiar, memory, material culture, and markings of time. Through malleable mediums and process-based work, she gives shape and form to impermanent aspects of the human experience. She received her BA in Art from the University of Southern California in 2018. She’s had solo and group shows in both Fort Worth, TX and Los Angeles, CA, and taught art in various capacities through arts organizations, museums, and the Montessori school system.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Alice Gompels / GBR

“It is a rare opportunity to stay in one place for two weeks: no comings and goings, no visitors, no shopping to collect or work to go to. A pleasure to find yourself on acres of land intersected by only small tracks, seven artists, and a large, empty, gorge. Juxtaposing the sparse landscape, however, is the abundance of what Donna and Simon have created, which presents as a large Farmhouse, surrounded by fruit trees and made up of light bedrooms and beautiful studios. In reality, there is even more than initially meets the eye.

For me, the set-up at Joya: AiR facilitated a perfect balance between private work and time to be with and learn from some incredible artists. In the studio, I was working on moving between printmaking and painting, to see how my process of image-making can become more fluid, through images based in magical realism and Andalucía.

Thank you to Simon and Donna for being great company and creating a space with such a vision. I am deeply grateful to my fellow artists who also revealed how nourishing it can be to live in an artistic community.

Alice Gompels

Alice’s work is about quiet moments, the times in silence that allow your brain to drift, and the places this can lead. Undertaking an art foundation at Kingston University in 2017, Alice went on to study Illustration (BA) at the University of Brighton, where she was awarded the chance to study at MCAD (Minneapolis) for four months. During the rest of her university career, she had several residencies across Europe, working on socially engaged projects in Rotterdam, Skopje and Bruges. Alice takes great pleasure in expanding her practice through study. After graduating in 2020, Alice worked on painting commissions and saved money to move abroad for further study. Arriving in Florence in 2021, she studied a six-month intensive technical drawing course. In September 2022, she received a grant to attend a specialisation course at Il Bisonte, a printmaking school in San Nicolò, where she continues to enjoy producing work today.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Katherine Leedale / GBR

“Joya was a cocoon and a loaf of good bread, sheltering and nourishing in equal measure.

I took with me ideas that quickly became redundant, so formative is this place. Rather than write about sailors and monsters, I found the heat, the cracked land, the thirst (of various kinds), the conversations with other artists, the expanse of time, the cool interiors and the strong sense of being held in suspension all insisted their way into my words.

While in residence I sliced up airport magazines to form cut-up poems (like a ransom note? asked another artist), using them to think through my nascent process and finding them a useful tool to tap into unconscious seams of interest as well as reflect and challenge patterns of word use. The colour palette of the surroundings and house and the rhythms of each day made themselves known, joining a palette of perennial interests. Certain textures, objects and the rise and fall of the sun repeatedly appeared in these works - china, for example, or gold.

The thinking space afforded by Donna and Simon's care meant I was able to tackle new technical challenges in my pen-to-paper writing, setting about capturing the movement of leaves and flies within set rhyme schemes, or exploring a mythic love in sonnet form, or a classical Greek ode to a much-longed-for ice-cold full-fat Coke. Finding support and encouragement from fellow residents meant I swallowed my nerves and actually memorised spoken word pieces before performing and filming in the land itself. I left poems on paper under rocks and in holes.

Each evening a handful of haiku made a diary of the day. This short form, existing so ephemerally, was perfect to capture the experience as it happened.

Now I am back in the UK I am shaping all these pieces into an interconnected set of three pamphlets. It feels good to have a concrete outcome but I would have been as delighted by the strides my writing practice took at Joya and the clarity of vision that the fortnight gave me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Katherine Leedale

Katherine Leedale studied English Literature with papers in Italian literature and culture at the University of Cambridge, and photography at the University of the Arts London. After graduating from the latter in 2010 she spent twelve years combining work as a portrait, theatre and dance photographer with her own arts practice and commissions as a visual arts workshop facilitator.

Exhibitions, readings and performances include The Vagina Festival; exhibitor at the PageMasters Zine Fair at South London Gallery; several iterations of The Icing Room including performed reading and installation of the manifesto Against Bathing at ‘I’m in the Bath, Where Are You?’; inclusion in ‘To Make Radical Poetry from Home’ publication, Athens Zine Bibliotheque; inclusion in the Inland Project at the Poetry Cafe; writing included in UWE Centre for Fine Print Research Book Arts Newsletter; published work as part of the Bloomsbury Festival; solo exhibition at VAULT festival; group exhibition at Photofusion Gallery; solo exhibition at the Yard Theatre.

She is the founder and curator of the micro-gallery and library gallery neuf neuf, an itinerant and occasionally activated space for small works of all disciplines.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / University of the Arts ‘Art for the Environment Residency’ selected artist Nicholas Holt / GBR

awake at the sun's first glow • italian-style percolator coffee • bristly flora • dog bark valley echoes • heightened senses • words read aloud under the olive tree • beer in green cans • whirr of the wind turbine • darkroom experiments • corks on cactus • moments of unknowing • second breakfast • boundaries blurring • siestas • connections and conversations • pool-time • no map no compass • rioja • welcome silence • hands in the dirt • shared sunsets • goat bell ritual • shakshuka • shifts in perception • butterflies in the barranco • joya magic

Nicholas Holt

The Art for the Environment Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the opportunity to apply for a 2 to 4 week fully funded residency at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy and human rights.

Founded in 2015, internationally acclaimed artist Professor Lucy Orta, UAL Chair of Art for the Environment Centre for Sustainable Fashion launched the programme in partnership with international residency programmes such as Joya: arte + ecología / AiR and UAL Post-Grad Community

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Kevin Bellò

“Early July, my mind was suddenly delivered to Joya: Air, and once unboxed from its fervent thoughts and 'Fragile' tape, I continued my trip on foot in the ecosystem. Solid upon the pedestal of its neck, my head was focused on observing and collecting the landscape, combining details to construct a ghostly point of view. An idea like a wind took me by surprise, and my soul rolled down from its plinth to join the hidden community of the desert. Tools down and hands up. Quiet like a warrior giving up on murder, I await the land for the first move of their new chosen play. This time, it was as if the quality of my posture, the tempo of my breath, and the vibration of my feelings somehow slowly nullified the innate prejudice the insects had towards me. Passing ants, bees, beetles, and flies approached me with curiosity. Noticing that all the branches pointed in every direction, I accepted my bewilderment. In the nights and days in Joya: Air, I dreamt my life this way.

In the end, I left the box of my head there to be eroded by the salty wind as I resumed my pathway. I will do it backwards this time: rewinding the obscure journey of everything I ever felt missing.

Kevin Bellò

Based between Porto, London and Milan, Kevin Bellò is a curator and researcher in the arts, food and ecology. He graduated with an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in 2021, and he is a curator for the ecological art collective Sympoietic Society and contributor to The Gramounce’s new Food and Art Alternative MA. Upcoming projects include curatorial work for the permaculture farm and art residency hub Quinta das Relvas (PT), as well as residencies in the UNESCO Biosphere Großes Walsertal (AT), Institute for Postnatural Studies (ES), La Foresta (IT), Matadero Madrid: Centre for Contemporary Creation (ES).

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Rosie Fea / NZL

“It was interesting in 2020 hearing many people furtively share how replenished they felt after initial lockdown phases. The novel sense of disengagement bringing about a total connectivity we weren’t previously aware of.. How many discovered new creative talents, or finally started projects that had been staring them down for years. As much as we convince ourselves we are modern and resilient humans, there’s always a pull for a way of life that is less speedy and complicated. To experience intimate community involvement, and greater intent behind our daily happenings and interactions. Reaching less for exterior or superficial forms of grandeur, and more for an internalised, stabilising one. 

Being at Joya: AiR really confirmed this for me. And also confirmed how much my practice as a writer really does require sequestered time to percolate and organise my thoughts and ideas. ‘A room of one’s own’ as Virginia Woolf put it.

Prior to my stay I had recently quit a corporate job in favour of reclaiming the storyteller in me: setting off travelling with a nebulous plan and undecided end date. Simon and Donna’s place became the setting for my career cross-roads, allowing generous time to put pen to paper again, and become reacquainted with the notion of words being my greatest friend. And also a time of making such incredible new human-form ones too!!

I had originally pitched to work on a more structured, research-based, (less personal) writing project during my residency period... But, like many who have come and gone seem to say, the land, the people, the sense of other-worldliness, seemed to take precedence. As a writer, my craft / practice doesn’t always amalgamate much of a “body of work” by way of pictorial or tangible output, but experiences like this are what provide the absolutely invaluable philosophical fuel and practice hours that go behind the sentences and concepts that leak out onto a page after-the-fact. My future work will forever be richer because of it…

Reading my journal pages while sat at the airport on the day of leaving I really grasped how in that space, with such quiet and no distraction or stimulation from anything societal, how much you catch every single thought and feel every single feeling so clearly. Potent and ongoing, through the motions as they arrive, present, then settle / flee. Perhaps they are always there, and always this rolling and deep, we just don’t allow the complete removal from the din that drowns them out. As a writer, this is the gold dust I need more of: to hear my own voice, so I can offer something to the common one”.

Rosie Fea

Rosie Fea is a writer, anthropologist, content creator, producer who has forged a career while living peripatetically, travelling various countries in bursts seeing what narrative opportunity awaits. Since finishing study towards a Bachelor of Design in 2016, she has established a freelance-based body of work allowing her ideas to be showcased through various forms - photography, communication, and the written word. Specialist areas include long-form and short-form editorial writing, production and collaboration, and creative content production.

In November of 2021 she had her first book published. The pages are a collection of fragments privately penned across four years of itinerant living and eventually assembled into a series of prose and poetry about clinging to the ephemeral - a venture into things that no longer or do not yet exist.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Danielle Petti / CAN

“The silence, save for the breeze and birds. The undistracted noticing of the surroundings, up in the night sky and down at my feet. The intimate knowledge and care of the land from my hosts. These were three great takeaways from my stay at Joya. I came to Joya with the intent to play, experiment, observe, and forage.  I came with just a paintbrush and a few earths from my other travels and so the scale of my work surprised me. I allowed my work to take up space. Forced to be as resourceful as I could, I found earth and rock to move, clay to paint with, and wood to paint on. I created in the sun and for the sun. I created with the elements and then returned the work to the elements. I left content with the amount of play and deep thought, and with exchanges with artists and writers I’m lucky to have met”. 

Danielle Petti

Danielle Petti has a BFA from Toronto University and I will begin her MFA this coming September 2023. She has worked as a freelance photographer for 10 years but after living abroad in Italy, she found a narrower focus and direction for her artwork. She forages for rocks in nature, grinds them down into a paint, and often uses handmade papers to depict concepts inspired by motherhood, human origins, and sustainability. Her work falls within categories of environmental and conceptual art, with some figurative pieces as well. The process of making paint from found materials is hugely important to the overall meaning of her pieces as they draw attention to the materiality of the paint and to how the earthen materials are interconnected to all bodies.

photo and artwork Danielle Petti

photo Danielle Petti

photo Danielle Petti

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Kay Walsh / NZL

Sounds and sights remain with me on return to London after a week long residency at Joya: AiR

leaking light from the outside in
harsh bright white light dazzling the eye
The thwack thwack sound of the wind turbine
The view through the mesh from my upstairs window The goat bell ringing calling us all to dinner

This landscape pulls you in, holds and envelops, it is a landscape that seems to reveal all but it is the hidden narratives that lie within this place that intrigue. Evidence of seasons, past events, of the power of what nature can do with deep scared channels in the barranco that embody you as you walk its path.

The muted pallet of pinks, whites, ochre and peppered green become the focus.
Finding my feet adjusting to the light and heat meant a circadian shift, up early to catch the light and beat the heat.
It felt important to sink in and be still.

Initially staying close to the house recording the sounds and images that emerged at different times of the day evolved into walking and neural mapping of the surrounding landscape paying attention to the non human, the plants, rocks and terrain. This was an unfamiliar landscape to find a way in.
On day 4 I needed to elevate my view, to step away so I climbed one of the near by hills to get some perspective on my response to this ‘place’.
From above I could see the scale of the art+ecology project Simon and Donna had been working on for the past 15 or so years. Their sheer determination, passion and ambition to create something unique was evident in the land with its contours and plains visible from above.

Thank you for reminding me that our relationship to our environment needs our attention and care if we are to have optimism for our futures.

I look forward to sifting through the images and sounds in the edit to see what comes from my time spent at Joya with such generous and spirited people.

There is a lot to think about on return and a surprising new view of this city which seems so green in contrast!

Kay Walsh

1998-2000 MA Fine Art Goldsmiths University London
1992-1995 BA 1st class hons Central St Martins London

Recent Exhibitions
2022-23 All His Rights RAMM Exeter UK
2020 All His Rights OBS Gallery Beast Exhibition UK
2019 Blue Hills Southwark Park Gallery London
2018 Re-landscsping collage work Outpost Exhibition UK
2017 Inhabitants lighbox work Southwark Park Galleries UK

photo Simon Beckmann

Roanne Sanchez - Watts / GBR

Joya: AiR is play. 

Breathing; crying too.

It is expanse, and marvelling. 

Joya: AiR was like holding a mirror up and seeing what was really within. 

During my two week residency, the space, the beauty and the shared community at Joya: AiR reawakened my practice. My confidence and association to the title of ‘artist’ was low, but felt honoured by being given it on my arrival. The trust and respect with which Simon and Donna welcomed all the artists encouraged a sense of investigation into my way of working. 

I spent the time drawing in the studio and responding intuitively to the land and my thoughts. The synergy between making, writing and reading produced a gentle momentum. For a while it feels like you are getting nowhere until you realise that you are actually somewhere. I ended up using simple mark making in stone and pencil to make rings that dealt with ‘meeting points’. They were my way of processing my relationship with my father, who lies ill not far from Joya: AiR. 

I made rings because I wanted to be close. I made rings, many of them, because I was touching a place I hadn’t before. 

Roanne Sanchez - Watts

Using jewellery as a storyteller, Roanne’s practice responds to the meaning found within human connection and acknowledges that jewellery can be the embodiment of the emotional and physical sentiments we share. Often uncomplicated, her forms invite us to place our own tales upon them. They are emotionally laden works, simply put. 

Roanne graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2020 with a BA in Jewellery Design.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Ellyx Martinez / USA

“Joya: AiR is a quietly powerful and awe inspiring space on all levels. Leaving and reflecting on my time here, I feel entirely humbled and grateful for the privilege of being able to share time with this incredible residency and the life that surrounds it. As my time here unfolded, deep listening and appreciation for the land holding our shared home became unavoidable. When applying here, I hoped seeing Spain and its landscape in the context of care my ancestors knew could give me insight on the mixed identity I’m learning to carry. I couldn’t have expected the absolute embrace I felt from the space and the found family that emerged. Whether we were patiently waiting for the sunset together, making tea at all times of the day, wandering to the sound of wind through trees, noticing the power of water in the high desert hills, or giggling at the untamable galloping of Simon and Donna’s dog, Frida as she chased the swallows- there wasn’t a single aspect of this experience that didn’t leave me with a swollen heart and a sense of recognition that comes with reconnecting with family, no matter how distant. The most potent takeaway was the power to witness each day with the people around me, simply enjoying the company of one another as we saw ourselves bloom in our work and discovery with the pacing only a space like this can give. Simon and Donna are incredible hosts and co-creators of this uniquely inspiring and joyful environment”. 

Ellyx Martinez

Ellyx is a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, studying for her Bachelors in Painting and Printmaking. She will graduate in December of 2023 as a Dean’s Scholar. In 2022, her work was shown in a juried exhibition: Layers of Ink in St. Louis, MO as well as a First Friday Exhibition in the Arrowmont gallery in Knoxville, TN. She was also commissioned to design and paint a mural for Mutual Aid Distribution. (Richmond, VA). She was chosen to be Arrowmont’s Visions Intern for the Summer of 2022. https://www.arrowmont.org/2022-summer-visions-intern-ellyx-martinez/.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Inês Coelho da Silva / PRT

“Coming directly from London to Veléz Blanco constituted a radical confrontation, as I constantly debated between the need to embrace the slowness of the desert and the capitalist speed of “doing” that the city imposed on me. It took me a few days to adjust, to stop nervously fidgeting during resting hours, to accept that there could be resting hours. When the land finally got me, and I was with the land, and the land was within me, I was transported to my roots in rural Portugal. The smell of hot summers, the perfect darkness after sunset, the almost absence of human sounds. I lived the memory of how my grandmother always wore an apron over her dress, in which she would keep all her most important things: her handkerchief, her rosary, scissors, house keys, a pencil, a pacifier for the children, some loose grains of sea salt (“You never know when you’ll feel hungry in the fields; if the tomatoes are ripe, you must carry some salt with you...”, she justified). I’ve made my own apron in Joya, but empty, to be filled with notes to remember and ideas I could need later. I walked around and took notes, embroidering on my apron (my slow notebook) plants I connected with and wished to research later. I’ve learned about/from/with endemic plants, travelling others, and the ecosystem that embraces them (us) all together. My apron is now accompanying me on further walks”.


Inês Coelho da Silva

Inês Coelho da Silva is an artist and researcher based between London and Porto. She graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2021 and is currently collaborating with the collective The Gramounce for the 2023-2024 Food and Art Alternative MA. Upcoming projects include the European research project SEEDS - Means for a Sustainable Art Practice (PT, ES, GR), and residencies at the Institute for Postnatural Studies (ES), La Foresta (IT), and Matadero Madrid: Centre for Contemporary Creation (ES).

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Claudia Robalino / ECU

“At Joya: AiR, I engaged with the landscape intuitively. Mapping my daily walks and documenting them through a series of interactive “tools” made with wild clay collected onsite. 

The sculpted tools play with the body intimately. They focus on the corporeal postures experienced during a walk, and the pauses taken to smell, touch, and observe. The process of making happened indoors, working in the studio only from memory to translate the walks into material narratives and the rhythms of my body into rituals of repetition. The objects laid out on the communal table at the end of the residency, remember the daily ritual of shared dinners with the artists. They rearrange the clay from the site into a reductive geometry and ephemeral botanic surfaces that evoke the body-nature interrelations - the linear and cyclical times, the ecological growth and transformation, individual and collective, sound and silence. A performative encounter in which the space inhabited is the residual trace of the walk and the unfired material is the medium of temporal documentation. 

The roads in the landscape were an invitation to walk, yet the paths taken during my residency were unpredictable and unplanned, exposing them like a text that needs to be read in order to embody the vast space. The encounters with the land are not reduced to a place, a length, a material, or a location; but rather transcribed into tools of observation in the abstraction of language. The steps taken are visually undocumented, allowing the space to be inhabited by anyone who experiences the objects; and that itself creates another space too. 

As part of my practice, walking in nature is primary to the work, and yet the spatial experience is left to the user’s imagination. Not showing a walk or a representation of it, but encounters between geography, body and ritual. An evocative narrative of corporeal and sensorial moments experienced outdoors and dislocated to the "domestic" indoors”.

Claudia Robalino

Claudia is a multidisciplinary Ecuadorian designer, she studied Architecture in Ecuador, Sustainable Design at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign - USA and recently graduated with MA in Architecture at the Royal College of Art London, where she won the Dean's Prize, Head of Program Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Prize for her thesis "Tailoring Camouflage." This project, driven by her childhood living in the Andes, is a vital part of her creative practice; focused on methods of environmental conservation such as expressive camouflage and ancestral rituals of planting, weaving and walking in nature. Her work investigates the body-nature interrelationships across multiple scales of intimacy, interweaving bodily experiences and cyclical living while actively confronting extractivist forms in vulnerable ecosystems. Her projects have been published in Architects Journal, Linseed Journal, Koozarch, and Arts Thread, RIBA among others and exhibited in Galleries in London, Rome, the Tallinn Design Festival and Ecuador. Soundscapes, scent and oral histories are part of her investigation, transcribing them into digital & spatial interventions which often use photography and natural materials and allow for collective experiences to take place; alongside new dialogues & connections.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Eric Araujo / USA

“An adventure in magnitudes and minutia.  Like The Powers of Ten,  Joya lets you know just how small you really are.  There’s a clarifying  silence that swaddles the valley and abates the limits of your senses. Gazing through the horizon, depth is abstract, shapes of greens, blues, greys and subtle pinks mix, float, and flatten.  In July the Sun commands.  There’s a tempo to align with as the rhythm of the day is gripped by the heat.  Cool mornings offer the landscape and the possibility to  traverse the barranco below or engage with studio practice.  Come midday it seems the world has paused.  As the sun sets beyond the mound, the wind picks up and a calm has come to the day.  It is this feeling of tranquilidad that I left Joya with and now attempt to maintain as I’ve returned home to New York City.

I went to Joya without intention.  I sought to decompress, slow down, process, and gain awareness and experience for how it is possible to live and thrive with climate consciousness on remote depopulated land and simultaneously give back to that land.  Simon and Donna have breathed life into a place that saw past generations walk away from, their cortijo is the nucleus of a climate positive enclave that welcomes a diverse group of creatives into an intimate setting.  Without distraction I made watercolors, pencil and pen drawings, clay and driftwood sculptures, and transformed  some old bamboo shades into piles of lattice I then wove into sculptural forms.  I slept well, wrote, read, and shared stories and healthy  “Ricisima” meals with my cohort, it was an invaluable experience and I am incredibly grateful to Simon and Donna for their relaxed spirits and jovial gracious hospitality”.

Eric Araujo  - estadounidense/Nueva York

AiR: July 10-24th, 2023

Eric Araujo is an interdisciplinary artist from New York. His practice extends across various mediums such as sculpture, drawing, and public practices. Eric received his BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Eric’s work has been shown in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa Valley, the Canzani Center Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design, Johannson Projects in Oakland CA, BRIC Arts Brooklyn and Raritan Valley Community College in NJ. In Spring of 2017 he was the sculpture fellow at The Bascom Center for the Arts in Highlands, NC where he created 3 large-scale permanent outdoor public works, and during the summer of 2018 Eric collaborated with the artist Danh Vo on new sculptures that were exhibited at the SMK in Copenhagen.
Most recently from November 2022 - January 2023 Eric had a solo exhibition of his most recent body of sculpture and wall works with Chashama in NYC. For 10 years he served as Adjunct Assistant Professor of 3D Design, Sculpture and Drawing at Raritan Valley Community College. He is currently the Mount Maker for the Museum of Modern Art.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Richard Mason / GBR

“Joya: AiR is without doubt a unique place. High up in the hills of the Sierra María-Los Vélez Natural Park you can wander freely past almond groves and amongst the pine trees. My early morning walks provided time for reflection and inspiration for making. Having left the trappings of my studio behind I was free to experiment with whatever came to hand. The clay, wild plants and grasses that I found provided the perfect materials with which to explore themes of lightness and fragility that continue to fascinate me.

Thank you, Donna and Simon for your support and amazing hospitality. I will treasure the memories of so many wonderful meals shared in the warm evenings with strangers who very quickly became friends”.

Richard Mason

Richard Mason’s mobile sculptures explore themes of balance, lightness and a sense of joy! He is interested in forms that fill a space with little volume and have a spare, restrained aesthetic. The limited palette of colours and choice of materials reflect these concerns. He uses found materials as well as wood and metal to kinetic constructions that are as efficient and simple as possible, in a balance of function and form.

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Cristal Buemi / CAN

“For me, space in its many forms, was the main thing I was longing for during my time at Joya: AiR.  Physical Space - from the beautiful studio provided for me to reconnect with my practice of stop motion animation, to the incredible landscape where I gathered natural materials like wild flowers, herbs, rocks and pigments to experiment with.  Emotional Space - for personal reflection, writing and engaging conversations shared with my fellow artists on walks, and at our family dinners where we were blessed each night with Donna’s beautiful homemade cooking.  Mental Space - a slow paced serene environment to share our practices, and learn about each others’ journeys, approaches and perspectives every night at our artist talks.  But most importantly the space to allow for each artist to have their own unique experience, free from production pressures, where one can dive deep into new ideas, materials, and techniques, while being present and grounded back into the land.

I feel very grateful for this incredible space centered around community and ecological art making. I will hold this time, the work/ ideas created and the new woven friendships in my creative soul for a while to come. Gracias La Joya.  Hasta la próxima with love”!

Cristal Buemi

Stop Motion | Multimedia Artist | Art Educator

Cristal holds a BA from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MA from Bau, Design College of Barcelona. Her collaborative and individual works have been exhibited worldwide including its inclusion in Animac (2017) The New York City Independent Film Festival (2017), Venus Fest (2021) and broadcasted on AMC (2022). Most recently her work exhibited at Harbourfront Centre’s Pandemic Postcards Series as part of CoMotion Festival (2022), at Fashion Art Toronto (2022), and animations she contributed to the HBO documentary “Great Photo, Lovely life” which premiered at South by Southwest last month (2023).