Everything is a sunflower if you’re brave enough

Hi everyone!

My art residency of CEC Arts Link Fellowship is in University of Kansas, Lawrence. It’s a small town near Kansas City. (Don’t think it’s a middle of nowhere, it’s a very cool place!)

Some parts of it seem unreal – it looks like a decoration on an American dream.

And everything is named after sunflower here))

But it’s a very progressive city and very famous for its college life, arts, and sports. And hills. Kansas, in general, is “flat like a pancake”, but Lawrence has its hills and its own spirit. I think that it’s art community is bigger than in my hometown, which is 20 times bigger than Lawrence.

Lawrence campus is big and beautiful,

and some modern buildings are extremely inspiring!

 

I’m having 2 in 1 in my residency:

I’m hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and they are organizing all public events and lectures for the students. I’ve already given two lectures for the students of Eurasian studies, some interviews for their projects, the poetry readings in the city Public Library, the poetry seminar, and also I brought some hard-to-get books for the department’s libraries: self-published poetry, some gender studies, journalist investigations, etc. And I’m going to have more – at least a meeting with a Russian literature class, a brownbag talk on my art projects, and probably some informal meeting with art students. They say they’d like me to stay longer)

and the rest of my time I spend at the Department of Visual Arts, learning ceramics.

I use different mediums in my projects, and I always wanted to try using something crafty&cozy. But it demands special skills end equipment! And in this residency, I got a very precious opportunity to learn clay arts. It’s an amazing new world, and they have everything in this place, really! I’m learning and experimenting a lot.

 

 

 

People here are very nice and welcoming, we are having a very nice time together

Thanks to the ceramics activities, I’ve been invited to participate in a traditional ground pit firing at Haskell Indian Nations University – a special Institute for Native Americans which is also here in Lawrence.

 

I found that their special programs have much in common to our postcolonial issues in Kazakhstan. I’m planning to meet the social studies professor from Haskell next week. I’ll let you know if something interesting appears! See ya!