Architectural historian Catja Edens reflects on her residency at Joya: AiR, developing doctoral research on the archival representation of women architects and discovering the value of play, vulnerability and experimentation within academic practice.

My practice spans three decades and has evolved from documentary reportage and portrait photography towards a sustained inquiry into the relationship between built and natural environments – and increasingly, into what occurs when that boundary dissolves.

Vasundhara Mathur is a London-based artist working across music, oral history, publishing and collective archives. At Joya: AiR, she explored voice, memory and landscape.

Laurie is an Amsterdam-based writer, entrepreneur and therapist. She recently completed Sophia's Tears, a collection of poems about reclaiming one's voice and body, and is currently finishing her debut novel.

Joya: AiR, during my second residency in two years, remains a bastion of creative possibility and a balm for the spirit, heart, and mind. I arrived, astonished, to a super bloom of poppies, camomile, lilies, irises, and countless other flowers, which had transformed what I previously knew as a white, glowing landscape into a riot of colour and richness.

Sarah Flack is a Canadian-based dance artist. She received her BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase College in New York in 2020. Shilo Preshyon is a Vancouver Island-based sound artist, musician, producer, and audio engineer of mixed cultural heritage.

Mother and daughter artists Louise Hardy and Martha Barr spent two weeks working alongside one another at Joya: AiR, bringing together painting, sculpture, landscape and material experimentation. For Louise, a return to Joya offered renewed focus on the topography of the surrounding landscape; for Martha, her first professional residency became an immersive exploration of local wild clay, ecology and making directly with the land. Their shared residency opened a rare space for two distinct practices – and two generations – to meet through conversation, observation, materials and making.