On gratitude, collaboration, and the first growing season of Sequel.
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to reshape society. This is something I have come to know — through the making of four living sculptures and now Sequel, my fifth, and through the extraordinary people who have shown up to witness it grow.
“What does urban land become when we stop managing it against itself?”
Among them are Bea Bellorin https://www.beatrizbellorin.com/ — artist, videographer, and mom — and Jake Eshelman https://jakeeshelman.com/ — photographer, co-owner of Feast Day Studio, and professional artist. Two people with full, demanding lives who still show up, every solstice, every equinox, with their tripods and their patience — and document the change.
The name Sequel carries two meanings, braided together. This is the fifth in a series of living sculptures — each one a continuation of the last, each rooted in the same question at its heart. And it is a sequel to something larger: to the colonial landscape practices that made grass a monoculture, soil a substrate, and nature a problem to be controlled.
Sequel is what comes after. What repair — chosen and tended — actually looks like.
I am incredibly grateful, and incredibly excited. Soon I will reveal the video from the first growing season — the one Bea has been quietly building, frame by frame, across four visits and four thresholds of light. I cannot wait for you to see what she has seen.
Jake’s photo documentation will also be exhibited as part of a piece in my upcoming two-person show at Throughline Art Collective in May — more on that piece in a future post.
None of this work happens alone. Thank you, Bea and Jake. Thank you to everyone who has walked through this space, asked questions, shared seeds, or simply let the wildness be.
The village is the work. The work is the village.