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.

Simon Beckmann18 September 2023