Greenhouse Residency at Mendocino Art Center (2024)
I spent a month at Mendocino Art Center in December 2024 doing thinking and research around the topics of land and memory.
The residency’s open call for applications met me at a particularly tender time in my life. At that point I had just entered a new season of life on the personal front: our family grew into a unit of three. I saw the residency as a time to lie fallow as new ideas to take root.
When we finally arrived in Mendocino in December 2024, it was after a long drive up from Los Angeles. Everything was pitch dark. Whilst many often visit Mendocino in the summer, our residency happened in the winter. The daylight hours were shorter, of course, and there were warnings of coastal floods from time to time as well. That probably made every moment we had outside all the more precious. Over the next few days, we picked up corals by the beach, saw the ocean waves reach great heights (a king tide?), and found mushrooms in the mulch surrounding goat pens.
Despite my best efforts, most of my research hours over the past week still happened between the baby’s naps and after the baby went to bed for the night. Still, it was a luxury to have the time and space to consolidate some stray ideas that had been swimming around in my mind for a while. This all culminated in a short sharing session towards the end of my time at MAC. Simply titled Patchy, I wanted to use the opportunity to offer some incomplete readings around how one might approach a landscape as an archive. I had situated my entire sharing on the topic around Singapore and its context within Southeast Asia, but I came out of the session with a clearer sense of place – particularly that where I currently was.
MAC had been founded by Bill and Jennie Zacha in 1959. In conversations with those who were familiar with MAC and its history, many described Bill to me as an artist with a vision. When the Zachas arrived in the 1950s, “It had an unusual, almost unearthly quality about it – pure, quiet, unsullied – but it was dying,” Zacha was quoted saying. Surrounded by lush redwood forests, Mendocino as we know it today was established around the lumber industry in 1852. Logging activity was on a steady decline by the 1930s, and this led to many leaving the town. Interestingly, a sizeable portion of these early immigrants were Chinese – a fact that I would have loved to have dug deeper into, if only we had more time.
In her book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell writes that “context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears”. I threw my mind back to the moment I chanced upon the residency’s open call on social media, and wondered if there might be some nascent threads connecting the familiar sites I had been researching with where I now found myself, halfway across the globe.
In the meantime, here’s to more patchy plotting attempts ahead.
The original, and unabridged, version of this post was published here.