Caddisfly larvae are peculiarly industrious insects that build sculptural protective cases for their bodies. These structures are made of anything they can find in their aquatic habitat, including rocks, plant matter, twigs, and other debris bound together with silk. Similarly, artists often build their thoughts and artworks out of things immediately available to them.

We conceived of this project as an accretion of the various outputs from the studio. We, like the caddisfly, sculpt the detritus of art-making into something reflective of our environment. It is our hope to highlight the things that artists make adjacent to their art-making and to shed light on the process of thinking and its role in the production of art. We asked artists to send us outcomes from their studio practices, including poems, essays, sketches, ephemera, drafts, lists, experiments, or finished work.

For our first issue, we prompted the artists with the theme Transitions for its timeliness. We want to underline the ceaseless changes artists undergo as they negotiate the fickleness of making art within an increasingly unstable cultural/political/environmental landscape. In so doing, we hope to find commonalities and reveal idiosyncrasies in the way artists approach their work.

Participating artists: Yasmeen Abdallah, Jessica Adams, Karen Y. Chan, Maeve D'Arcy, Adriana Gallo, Linda Loh, Yorgos Maraziotis, Amalya Megerman, Whitney Ramage, Frank Zadlo