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

by Colette Copeland September 8, 2025 l Glasstire

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.

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