We received an update from current doctoral student Erin Gilbert on her artist residency at Marble House Project. After her summer residency, Erin is headed to Cádiz for the 2016-2017 academic year.
This summer, I attended the Marble House Project, an artist residency in Dorset, Vermont that brings together diverse artists working in a variety of disciplines. I spent my time there working on a series of French Revolutionary Calendar poems, and it was gratifying to turn from the scholarly work in which I had been so deeply immersed throughout the academic year to the creative work that also sustains me. Living in such close proximity with other practicing artists—we had separate studios but lived in the same house built of marble quarried on site over a century ago—shaped my work in some subtle and unexpected ways. Upon leaving, I went on a quest that took me up winding gravel roads in Vermont's Green Mountains, in search of the place where another group of artists used to gather for the summer—the home of the Russian-American Harvard Professor Mikhail Karpovich. When I arrived, the owners of the house invited me to have a look around, and I found myself at the edge of a pine forest very similar to one that appears at a pivotal moment in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin.