AIR - Resident Archive

Christie Jones

August + September 2025

My work explores climate change in coastal ecosystems by translating a sense of place through colors crafted from earth pigments into textures inspired by local landscapes. Committed to sustainability, I create these non-toxic paints, using both my artwork and educational workshops to foster awareness and inspire collective action to protect our environment.

As the Caumsett Artist in Residence, I will create a body of work that documents the park’s landscapes through color and texture. During my residency, I will create handmade paints from earth and mineral pigments found within the park (pending permission to collect small rock samples) along with sustainably sourced pigments that I currently use. These natural materials will form the basis of a series of works on paper and canvas, capturing the unique hues and textures of Caumsett’s diverse landscapes. My goal is to visually archive the park’s natural palette while fostering a deeper connection between the community and the land.

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Natasha De Armas

September 2025

My work depicts abstract forms and figures that are collaged together by intuitively juxtaposing textile materials and stitchery. These textile body iterations conjure feelings of loss and absence, and make something that was, present; while making something that is, absent. I dissect materials to investigate how humans exist in their lived bodies and outside of them. My work questions the perception of the experiences and realities of others as well as my own, the significance of objects in our lives and the meanings they encapsulate overtime.

I work primarily with textiles, found fabrics, discarded garments, paper, thread and other seemingly useless materials and objects. I explore how fabric, garments and our interactions with them can mutate overtime, making our relationships with fabric, clothes and their materiality more relevant rather than transitory and disconnected. At the intersection of material and meaning, my work layers and interweaves narratives of movement, pain, loss and separation.

The use of stitched patterns and repeated mark making parallel the repetition of movement patterns of human beings that is also found in nature’s other creatures. Embroidery and textile work are acts of quiet resistance. Working with fabric and thread allows me to slow down and contrast a world where everything moves at super speed. My recent incorporation of lens based media expands on my inquiry into the depth of being and our relationship to our surroundings.

For this residency, I propose an exploration of memory, presence, and place through textile-based printmaking at Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve. Using frottage and monoprinting techniques, I will create imprints of the natural surfaces found in the park—tree bark, stumps, leaves, and rocks—capturing the textures of the landscape as a form of embodied connection. These printed materials will then be sewn together into layered collages, echoing the act of piecing together fragmented memories and the way land holds traces of time and history. This project continues my inquiry into longing, nostalgia, and displacement, themes central to my practice. By engaging directly with the land, I seek to create a tactile archive of place, transforming transient impressions into material artifacts. The final sewn compositions will function as soft topographies—maps of touch and memory that reflect both personal and collective experiences of connection to land.

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Peter Tresnan

July + August 2025

My work explores the impact and influence of history and spatial politics in the lived experiences of queer people. I create representational drawings and paintings that expose and explore the ways in which queer people are specifically impacted by power, labor, sexuality, history. I source inspiration broadly: literature, sketching, collage, plein air, nightclubs, the subway, reality television. I develop multiple pieces simultaneously in order to create a conversation across images. My images manipulate light and space, blending techniques of oil painting in order to help me articulate the complexities of queerness as a lived experience.

I will explore how queer people experience the environment and history of the Caumsett Estate by creating a series of works, specifically 3-5 large, 6- to 8-foot oil paintings. I will draw on my lived experiences visiting Caumsett over the course of my life, as well as reading and research into the Gilded Age, phenomenology, and experiences in Caumsett during the residency. I will design programming to invite queer Long Islanders to consider their experiences of Caumsett as a historical, architectural, and environmental place, which will in turn inform the work I create in residence.

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Julia Forrest

July 2025

Using film photography with no digital manipulation I pose women in the landscape. By using mirrors, reflections, and forced perspective, I create an illusion in front of the lens. Although they misleadingly appear docile, it is obvious they possess a mysterious power to move the landscape at will. They change shape and scale, picking up parts of the landscape or completely transforming it.

If I am chosen for a residency with the Caumsett Foundation, I will be surrounded by the most ideal environment to perfect my series. Because the world is covered with urban development and the natural landscape is disappearing, I am interested in capturing what is left and using it as a backdrop to my photography. I will have the opportunity to walk out my door and spend all day finding unique spots, meeting people in the community, and photographing landscapes personal to them. In the studio, I will retire to my suitcase size darkroom to develop negatives and hand print photographs on Silver Gelatin Paper. I hope my work encourages people to savor what is around them and become aware that nothing will remain untouched unless hard work is put into place to keep it. I think creating work to raise awareness on the disappearing landscape is extremely crucial at this time. I know that with the Caumsett Foundation, I will no longer feel limited. I am excited to be given the chance to compose photographs that I could not compose anywhere else.

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Erwin List Sanchez

June 2025

My work explores the vibrant tradition of Mexican cartonería within the context of my experience living outside of Mexico. I am fascinated by how culture travels and adapts, transforming and enriching itself in new environments. My creations are primarily inspired by the natural world and its creatures. These fantastical animals, born from the intersection of my Mexican heritage and my present surroundings, become a reflection of my perceived environment. They embody the interconnectedness of our imaginations, demonstrating how we carry our cultural roots with us, allowing them to blossom and evolve in unexpected ways. Through cartonería, I sculpt the hybrid creatures of my imagination, where the familiar forms of Mexican folklore intertwine with the new realities of my present, creating a bestiary that is both rooted and reinvented.

This 4-week residency at Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve explored the park's natural beauty through Cartoneria Creatures, sculptures inspired by the environment and crafted using traditional Mexican cartonería (paper mache) techniques. The project includes open studio hours and alebrije workshops, engaging the community with the art and Caumsett's unique ecology.

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Samuel Ezra Fisch

April and May 2025

When I was a child, I dreamt the most amazing dreams. I also had the most amazing pair of pajamas. One evening, while I was wearing these fine pajamas, my little sister Kaela whose birthday is on my half birthday and vice versa, said: "when I was you, I wore those pajamas." Everyone laughed in disbelief of her past life, but I kind of understood. My dreams are still vivid as ever, so when I am awake I wonder about the space I perceive between pajamas. Artistically I make the kind pajamas that might help you remember something important. During the residency program I want to work on paintings and sculptures inspired by the natural environment of the preserve. I have a series of lenticular paintings on burlap that employ nature as metaphor. I also want to keep myself open to experimentation and inspiration from the environment of the residency.

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CJ Escobar-Rodgers

October 2024

My research in South American textiles significantly influences my art, highlighting human motifs alongside animal and plant motifs to suggest material equality and manipulability. This perspective aligns with contemporary new materialist and posthumanist philosophies, inspiring my depiction of the human form in clay. I explore the materiality of humanity, drawing from architecture, ornamentation, and nature- inspired technologies, like Ancient Greek columns that emulate forests or the Wright brothers’ aviation designs inspired by bird wings.

In my work, human elements serve both structural and decorative purposes, such as using the human foot and lower leg as foundational supports. Additionally, I embellish my pieces with fabrics and jewelry to contrast the innate desire for individuality with the material interconnectedness conveyed through the ceramic medium. My work delivers a message of humility and interconnectedness, positioning humans not as dominators but as integral parts of a broader ecological and cultural network. This approach underlines the importance of recognizing our anthropocentric biases to address ecological challenges and promote a more inclusive, globally conscious view that honors our bond with the natural world and various cultural perspectives.

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Andreas Rentsch

October 2024

My photographic work of late possesses a close aesthetic relationship to performance art, drawing and painting. Process has become more and more important in my art practice. My aim has consistently remained within the parameters of the photographic medium in order to discover new ways to articulate my ideas visually. Experimentation and chance have become important tools in my research. A large part of my methodology has been to abandon a considerable amount of control and allow the material to take over in some unexpected and unpredictable ways.

My unconventional approach to photography raises the question of medium specificity. As photography has been closely identified to the apparatus and to its reproducibility, the questions and limitations as defined in the past have given way to new explorations of alternative fields of study. The incorporation of other mediums has been a vital aspect of my art making, and this expansion opens up new avenues of expression.

My interest in the discourse of the medium’s potential can’t hide the fact that my work is anchored in a moral sensibility that relates to my upbringing. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a prison compound where my father was the warden and where daily interactions with convicts were common. These visual and real-life experiences nurtured a sense of empathy in me for the human condition that has been a guiding force in my life as well as my work.

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Vanessa Powers

August/September 2024

Vanessa Powers is a surreal figurative oil painter whose work uses a visceral symbolic language to navigate her inner world and how it relates to our current cultural climate in terms of how we process loss and uncertainty. Her paintings explore themes including grief, vice, mortality, and resiliency. Her work acts simultaneously as self portraits and memorials for people, places, and times that have passed.

Vanessa uses symbolism from phenomena in biology and earth science to ground her subconscious in a way that feels tangible in the real world. The figures in her paintings are translucent or isolated parts of bodies set in landscapes of places where she grew up on Long Island that often reference the climate crisis. The absence of the body within her figures is a meditative process that relies on where her emotions physically reveal themselves. The translucent insects and plants in her work can mostly be found in nature and are an example of this oscillation she presents between her subconscious, our collective psyche, and the natural world.

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Tina Hejtmanek

June/July 2024

"Using photography, sculpture, painting and drawing I create abstracted images that address concepts of temporality, perception and varying states of consciousness. I am interested in the power of nature. Symbolically, culturally, intuitively and in worship. Investigations of sacred space/land led me to explore sacred geometry and concepts of alternate space/planes. The paintings are evidence of a personal process I think of as intuitive geometry. Made with a snap line method with ink-soaked string the compositions are unplanned, the geometry is not measured. The process is highly active, performative and automatic... they are compulsive, intuitive and meditative investigations of space and geometry, real and interpreted."

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Laura Powers-Swiggett

May 2024

A residency is, for me, about total immersion. It is about creating the time and space to concentrate with intention on a particular project (or, in this case, a particular place) for a defined period of time, trusting that something new will be born. What would happen if I immersed myself in all that is Caumsett, a place that I love deeply? What would grow in me that might be expressed through my art? What new things might I discover — about Caumsett and myself? It would be a collaborative process with a life of its own.

I hope to capture the joy and wonder of a walk through the meadows and woods, a great horned owl’s gentle “hoo hoo” in my ears, the flight of a red-tailed hawk traced in the sky. Or my excitement as I glimpse the salt marsh through the tree canopy. When the view opens up at the end of the fisherman’s road, revealing Long Island Sound and the Connecticut shore beyond, I have questions — would one blue violet brush stroke be enough to describe the intersection of land, sea and sky? What does that junction really mean to me? There are discoveries to be made in the juniper and scrub pines, as their shapes play against the subtle colors of the sand spit’s underbrush, a palette of neutral grays that varies with the time of day, weather and season. The return walk along the bluff offers a bird’s eye view of shifting tidal patterns and blue cast shadows — a natural tutorial in organic abstraction.

Caumsett is a visual feast. I will open my senses and imagination to all that is there, and share what I find with others through open studios and community walks devoted to seeing like an artist. I will engage in a conversation with the landscape through a series of field studies, deepening my connection to this place that I love, and my understanding of who I am within it. I am curious what might be revealed over time. As I find rhythms and themes that excite me, I will expand my explorations to larger works in the studio. My ultimate hope is to distill what I have experienced into something that is both specific to Caumsett and also universal.

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Stephanie Perry

September-October 2023

Stephanie’s work is inspired by the delicate complexity of nature. Her oeuvre combines elements of botanicals, feminine, classical, and contemporary high and low art. The main elements of focus in her work are: form and surface. Her vision as a modern artisan is to play with these two elements to make something durational and enduring.

Stephanie is an avid explorer of Caumsett, interested in our collective relationship with the natural world. She will be focusing on the rhythm and narration between the work and the environment.

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Lauren Skelly Bailey

July-August 2023

Lauren Skelly Bailey is a ceramic artist based out of Long Island, NY. She holds a Master of Fine Arts, Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design. As well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Adelphi University in Fine Arts. Skelly works in layers, in a sometimes modular recursive process.

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David Almeidia

July-August 2023

Our first artist was David Almeida, a photographer and multimedia artist who is heavily inspired by nature and its preservation. Originally from Lisbon, Portugal, Almeida moved to London in 1998, where his interest in photography began. He currently lives and works locally in Cold Spring Harbor.

Most recently, Almeida has been collecting plastics and balloons along the Caumsett seashore and transforming the found trash into highly polished works of art. Almeida’s body of work entitled Seascapes flaunts colorful horizon lines with a sophisticated nod to minimalism, and yet, as a viewer, we are confronted with the knowledge that all of Almeida’s materials were once scraps of waste, polluting our environment.

Photo: David Almedia, Study for a Plastic Landscape (Caumsett 2119) #08, 2019, Archival Inkjet Print