Published in Glasstire, September 8, 2025 (click title to go to original article with photos)

Connecting with Community and the Land: A Workshop on Sustainability in Art & Life

by Colette Copeland 

Last month, I spent a week living and learning at Chelenzo, an organic farm outside of Santa Fe in Cerillos, New Mexico. Patricia Watts, curator, writer, and founder of ecoartspace — a global community of environmentally focused artists, scientists, and advocates — organized a retreat-style workshop that asked participants to understand materiality through traditional and sustainable methods in artmaking. We learned to make adobe bricks and natural plant dyes, and we did it together, living and working as a community.

I’ve been an ecoartspace member for about a year, attending many of their Zoom lectures by artists and scientists, and this was my first in-person meetup with fellow members. It can be tricky to live, eat, and work alongside relative strangers, but this week was drama-free: everyone arrived excited to learn, interact, and collaborate. Lorenzo and Chelsea Dominguez and their family cooked organic, fresh-picked food from the farm and we all came home a few pounds healthier and happier from the meals and good company.

The farm offers majestic vistas and hiking trails. Each morning, I walked to engage my senses and set an intention for the day. For urban dwellers, the absence of traffic noise and clean air is grounding and healing.

Mornings were spent with workshop leader Jeanne Dodds, an artist, conservationist, researcher, and educator whose creative practice embraces connections and materiality with non-humans. Dodds taught us about the ethical harvesting of plant materials and we created contact prints on fabric using sunflowers grown on the farm.

Juniper, abundant on the land (some might say invasive), provided the source for solar fabric dyes using its berries, needles, and bark. We boiled down our dyes to make ink for drawing and painting. 

Afternoons with workshop leader Ruben Olguin, an interdisciplinary, multimedia artist and professor whose work draws on his mixed Indigenous American and Spanish (mestizo) heritage, taught us how to make traditional adobe bricks infused with local plant and wildflower seeds and how to source local minerals for pigment. I spent one afternoon attempting to pulverize a mineral rock with a hammer and chisel. An exercise in humility and patience, I respect those who continue this labor-intensive practice. Midweek, we split into two groups, with each group completing a seed-filled adobe sculpture designed to decompose over time, feeding and creating new growth for the land. 

Our last day was spent reflecting on our work together. At the encouragement of Watts, I created and performed an eco-performance entitled The Land Doctor. The work questions what it means to be a steward of the land in an era of ecological crisis, exploring care, reciprocity, and healing between people and the earth. 

Some key takeaways from the week? Collaboration. My most rewarding projects have grown from interactive, meaningful exchanges with others. We were tired at the end of the week, but proud of what we accomplished. After 25 years of teaching, I find myself more interested in being a student again — learning from others and working across practices to heal the earth and perhaps, each other.

Although sculpture and dye work aren’t central to my usual practice, I appreciated the week’s hands-on tactility. Before harvesting, we offered land and plant acknowledgments to thank the materials and the people who tended this land before us. This ritual shifts the relationship between material and maker, inviting reciprocity into the artmaking process.

For me, the throughline is clear: community, land, and sustainability belong in a single loop — each feeding the other. If you get the chance to participate in a retreat like this, bring curiosity, patience, and a willingness to learn from neighbors and the land alike.

I’ve been focusing my eco performances on collaborations with non-humans for the past year, and I’ve found myself reflecting on what it means to be a caretaker in this time. What does it mean to practice deep listening as a form of radical resistance? When we consider all things, animate and inanimate, as co-creators in a shared ecosystem, caretaking becomes daily work rather than a project with a deadline. It’s less about mastering the material and more about learning its rhythms and honoring the relationships that grow from engaging with non-human co-creators.

In my performances, listening isn’t a passive hush; it’s an active listening to the land speaking through time, texture, and earth. The color I coaxed from juniper and sunflowers isn’t just decoration — it’s a memory of sun on leaves, soil, and rain. The prints I pull from the cloth are not merely images; they are conversations between human hands and plant memory. Non-human collaborators aren’t background players; they are co-authors of the work.

For me, radical resistance looks like restraint and reciprocity. It means asking before taking, sharing tools and resources, and designing with waste in mind so nothing precious is discarded when a work is completed. This approach broadens the circle of care beyond the studio walls to the kitchen, the garden, and the community where we engage with others. The work becomes a community act, a web of care that invites more hands, more voices, more listening.