Joya: AiR / Maleea Acker / CAN
photo Simon Beckmann
Joya: AiR / Maleea Acker / CAN
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. The Scopes owl sang me to sleep as always every night, but was joined by the wood lark and the Eurasian blackbird.
It’s hard to express how inspiring it is to live off grid in community in such a stunning location, with the company and inspiration of fellow artists, volunteers, and Donna and Simon. I came to JOYA to complete my fourth book of poems, a manuscript that’s been a difficult charting of grief and illness (death of family members, survival of cancer). During the residency, to inform and support my writing, I turned to ceramics, burnishing and firing small pots as a series of grief receptacles, and to painting, using natural materials like flower petals and olives to make wild botanical inks. Each station in my studio was a release from and a deepening into the poems. JOYA allows the time and space (giving writers a studio just like visual artists) to explore and inhabit a variety of practices, and to enlarge the concept of myself as an artist and what my practice can involve.
I can’t say enough good about this place. I left with a completed manuscript and a much-needed reconfirmation of my practice.
It heals and supports and inspires—the people, the food, the daily rhythms, the landscape, the song of the insects, birds, wild boars, foxes, and other beings. All becomes part of the work, and the work is continually, in surprising and welcome ways, enriched by the place. I only hope I have been able to give a little back in return.
Maleea Acker
Dr. Maleea Acker
Post-doctoral research fellow
Environment & Climate Change Canada
Unceded Territories of the Lekwungen &
WSÁNEĆ peoples
Writer | Journalist | Educator
