The Studio Is the Artwork

Co-Creation Studio at Dream Lab

The studio rarely looks like what people expect.

On some days it feels like a collection of simultaneous processes: drawing, video, conversation, construction, interruption, laughter. There is no single project, no fixed outcome, no answer key.

From the outside, it can look unfinished.

From the inside, the unfinishedness is part of the work.

What I have come to understand is that this is not an exception. It is the condition of Co-Creation Studio.

One Thursday afternoon, this condition became visible in a very ordinary way.

The students arrived and slipped off their shoes at the entrance. I never ask anyone to do this. It began simply because I spend long days in the studio and prefer to work barefoot. On this day, I noticed that the students did the same.

We gathered around the table and talked about what we wanted to do that day.

Some ideas were already written on the chalkboard. I call it the Dream List. Whenever someone mentions something they hope to make, explore, or learn, I write it down so we won't forget. Sewing. Teaching each other. Micro business. Internship. Wall art… The list helps us remember that today's small experiments are connected to larger possibilities.

Possibilities.

One student knew exactly what she wanted to work on. She wanted to decorate a new phone case and had already sent me images to print.

Another student wasn't sure. She wandered through the studio looking for inspiration.

It was an unusually hot day on the Monterey Peninsula for which the studio is not equipped.

A few minutes later, she began folding colored paper. Fold after fold, the paper transformed into a fan. Soon she was walking around the studio giving everyone cool air.

The fan quickly became communal property. We passed it around while continuing our own projects.

Response.

Meanwhile, the phone case slowly accumulated printed images, painted lace patterns, and bits of tape, becoming a collage assembled from many suggestions and discoveries.

The student who made the fan eventually started creating small sculptural forms she called "sea balls," inspired by a giant kelp sculpture in the studio that had captured her attention the week before.

Transformation.

At some point, I picked up the fan and began demonstrating dances I remembered from Japan in the 1990s. The students laughed and responded with observations about contemporary youth culture. The conversation drifted from art to memory to trends and back again.

Two hours passed.

As always, someone eventually looked at the clock and said, "It's already cleaning time!"

We cleaned the studio together.

Then everyone went home.

They had been here before. The same students, the same room, but never quite the same sequence of events.

This pattern—of things appearing, circulating, transforming—has happened before. Weeks earlier, something else had already begun to move through the studio.

Students started by switching drawings every 5 minutes for a half an hour, working directly on each other's paper. In that exchange, images began to drift between hands rather than stay attached to authors.

From those drawings, something unexpected appeared: eggs.

Not assigned. Not planned. Just appearing, as if the studio had begun to repeat a motif it was not finished with yet.

That image later returned as a small sculpture, inspired by an egg-shaped beanbag I had made for the studio's lounge area.

Then it shifted again.

The following week, one student arrived wearing egg-shaped earrings and painted an egg with an eye in its center.

And then, quietly, eyes began to appear in other works.

What was once an egg became a way of seeing.

Return.

Each session did not replace the previous one. It continued it.

This is what I have come to understand as Co-Creation Studio.

One thing leads to another, not through instruction, but through attention.

A fan becomes movement.

Movement becomes conversation.

Conversation becomes memory.

Memory becomes material.

Material becomes something shared.

People often ask what students make in Co-Creation Studio.

The answer is easy enough. They make sculptures, videos, drawings, performances, installations, and countless other things.

But that answer never feels complete.

Because what happened that Thursday afternoon was not simply a collection of individual projects.

Something else was taking shape.

The studio itself was becoming the artwork.

Between.