…because I was invited to the Galveston Artist Residency! Ten months of focused, supported time for my art practice: studio, apartment, stipend, community. I’ll be there from October through July of 2027!

the short

• I’m in residence at Ucross for the month

• I’ll be at the Galveston Artist Residency for ten months starting in October

• Bus is in semi-retirement after suddenly donating a solar panel to the great state of Wyoming’s highway system (among several other cool new issues)

• I am having a lot of feelings about all of it

the long

Hi from the…truck???

Yes friends, your girl is now ripping around Wyoming in her 4×4 Ford F150 (with the 2.7 ecoboost if you care about these things). Feels great to drive without noise cancelling headphones and be able to pass people on the highway again. Right now, I’m at Ucross, a residency for artists, writers, dancers, and composers on a historic ranch near the Bighorn mountains. Do I love cruising around the ranch in my big white truck? Absolutely.

Getting into Galveston came at an already shifting time: Scott and I were setting up an apartment together in Ogden that was going to become more of a central home base between stints of bus fieldwork. This was a paradigm shift in itself, that the bus didn’t necessarily have to represent my entire sense of home as it has for the past three years.

Ucross had generously allowed me to reschedule my residency to the month before leaving for Texas. I was trying to spend July living outside in the sage and rocks before 11 months of studio time (!).

But the bus had other ideas. It has always been burning oil, but at this point my mechanic’s advice was, “I’d drive it until it died on me, then decide on an engine swap then.” Not ideal for the 1700 mile drive to Texas, especially since I wouldn’t be living in it all year anyway. What a lot of stress and gas money to be annoyed every time I had to drive it to the grocery store. It needed to be babied, put in semi-retirement.

So I pointed it back to Ogden to buy a more reliable vehicle. On the drive back, a crosswind ripped off one of my solar panels. Thankfully nobody was behind me. I threw some wire nuts on the torn wires, zip-tied them to the unistrut (which was bent from the force of the panel) and drove through pounding rain back to Ogden. There I discovered that the panel had torn a hole in the metal roof that had allowed a stream of water into my kitchen. I also found that the lingering smell of diesel was because my diesel heater tank had been leaking into all the wood under my bed and into my floor, requiring a complete rebuild of the bed area.

The bus was letting me know it needed a break. I needed a break.

I cried unloading my bus bookshelf into the house, and I asked Scott way too many times if my rocks and trinkets were too much to bring inside (he’s very patient). I felt exposed; my snail shell had been abruptly torn from me. As Chris put it, the bus represented the detritus of my former LA life reassembled into the coziest cocoon I could make for myself. It was the physical entity that held my own sense of home and belonging together, custom built from my own will and towards my most idiosyncratic dreams. It was the container that allowed me the space to attend to my deepest instincts as an artist.

It felt like a sudden end. And yet, dealing with all of its mounting issues, I felt like the bus itself was demanding I let it go and fully commit to the next chapter – a new sense of home (gulp) and a new rhythm in my art practice and career.

Two days later, I bought Truck.

Three days later Scott and I drove it to LA to collect all my things from storage (mostly more books).

I’m consolidating. And here at Ucross, I’m sleeping a lot trying to let the dust settle.

More soon,

Christina

P.S. The bus will live again! I’m keeping it for certain kinds of extended fieldwork in the future. Ultimately I plan to use it as a tiny house when we are able to buy land and build the shop/studio of our dreams.