Thorndike Library talk: Studio in the field: Art as research, and making a living

If the world is not yet ready to support you as an artist, how can you support yourself? How can you provide yourself with the opportunities that you need to keep growing and making your work? One of the ways Ialeggio has answered these questions for themself over the years has been through participating in scientific field research, as both researcher and visiting artist. In this talk, they will share some of their experiences in that realm, reserving lots of time to talk together more generally about the question of how we can keep doing the things that we have become most interested in doing when it’s time to leave college.

Questions to ask together: Can our necessary attempts to survive as artists become the matrix for an interesting, helpful, and well-supported life? Do we really have to pick between making art and making a living? Can artists contribute to scientific field research?  Could an extremely nonlinear career actually lead to making some pretty decent art?

Ialeggio is a faculty member in interdisciplinary arts at College of the Atlantic and teaches courses in ceramics. Their artwork and teaching practice are “intimately linked,” they say. They work with sculpture, ceramics, performance, drawing, text, and media to explore overlaps between ecology, social protocol, and narrative structure. Ialeggio’s work explores the perception of change that occurs as each generation redefines for itself what is considered natural or normal.