Studio Sessions
Creature Constructions
with Rosemary Holliday Hall
October 2025
About the Studio Session
Ants stack grains, wasps coil mud, swallows drip nests, termites raise towers, crabs tunnel chambers, and worms turn the soils. Every builder moves earth, molds clay, and constructs shelter with body language and practiced intent.
Each week of this Studio Session, we follow a particular species, studying how they shape, stack, fold, and carry the earth. We watch, imitate, and let their rhythms, materials, and techniques unsettle our own habits of making.
Clay serves as our field notebook recording touch, place, and gesture while opening new ways of thinking with the world. As we stretch toward more‑than‑human craft, we ask: How do we relate to scale, perception, intent? What do we notice? What might we unlearn? How do we organize space? How does our human scale of time, body and perception intersect with or diverge from other species?
About the Lead Artist
Rosemary Holliday Hall is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, sculpture, ceramics, moving image, and performance. Her evolving body of work explores the dynamic relationships between nature and culture. Hall holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of California, Davis, where she also minored in Environmental Horticulture. Her work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally.
She has been awarded numerous residencies, fellowships, and collaborative research grants with scientists. These include Nemeth Art Center Artist Residency (forthcoming), Taft Gardens Artist Researcher in Residence, the UC Davis Bilinski Fellowship with PhD Tracie Hayes, Ex.Change Artists and Scientists on Climate Change in Chicago, the University of Chicago Art, Science & Culture Grant, Leroy Neiman Oxbow Fellowship, and the Maria and Jan Manetti Shrem Royal Drawing School Fellowship.
In 2025–26, Hall will serve as artist-in-residence at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, where she will develop new work in collaboration with ecological researchers at the center. She is also the co-founder of Spore Space, a tiny artist-run exhibition venue in downtown Ojai, California, where she currently resides.
Logistics
This session is scheduled for Sundays, October 5, 12, 19, and 26 from 10am-noon PST (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $250 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.