In 2015, my husband and I had a residency at the Ballinglen Foundation for the Arts in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland. We spent our days in the studio while our three children went to school in Ballycastle or nearby Lackencross.

This was a five-week, winter residency. For a family of privileged Americans, the experience was both bleak and strikingly beautiful. It was about being present with ourselves and each other; in the cottage provided for us we had no television, no cell reception, no internet, no dishwasher, and no clothes dryer. We had a radio, books left behind by other artists, and a few packs of cards. Without distractions and the responsibility of daily trappings, we changed the way we thought and entertained ourselves, if only for a short while. After studio time, the whole family bundled up, put on our “wellies” and went out to find what we could see, eat, and drink. The coastal town of Ballycastle is quaint and no-nonsense. The “downtown” housing the Ballinglen Foundation was a street bisecting fields and pastures. There were at least twenty five different shades of green, brown, and gray everywhere one might look.

There was nothing moderate about this experience; everything was in the extreme. Rain was a constant, accompanied by multiple rainbows a day. At almost every opportunity, we stepped ankle deep in puddles or tumbled into the omnipresent mud, much to the delight of my 7 year-old son. The wind whistled through the chimney of our cottage. We burned peat bricks in the fireplace, drank a lot of tea, and sipped smooth and smokey whiskey. The tin roof and windows of the print studio amplified every drop of rain, gust of wind, and the delicate silver light emerging through a cloud-filled sky. Within the work I made in Ballycatle, I tried to reference such things as well as rock walls, lush farmland, and the layers of rich earth, rock, and peat that were bombarded by fierce and frothy waves.