Sulis Studio is an artist collective and community art space that hosts workshops, classes and collaborative events. We partner with local organizations and artists to promote community responsibility for the arts, healing, and social justice. The core organizers of the space are Raven Burrell and Becca DeWitt. The space is rented out to an additional group of around 10 artists and the artist collective consists of a network of artists beyond the renters.
Since its inception in May of 2022, Sulis Studio has hosted an array of workshops in figure drawing, natural dye, botanical ink, poetry, abolitionist zine making, and queer figure drawing. We have partnered with local organizations such as People’s Medicine Project, Decarcerate Western Mass, Crossing the Waters, Jewish Voice for Peace, The Ruggles Center, Bombyx, and Mixed Greens for educational and organizing events. The space has become a hub for community organizing and creative exploration and is now held by a thriving group of artists and organizers.
In 2023, we founded a performance art collective called Sight Productions, a project of Sulis Studio that creates immersive, multi-disciplinary installation events that include visual art, performance, music, ritual and interactive displays. The collective performances and immersive art events put on by Sight Productions include Sight, Tracing Water, and Hands for Palestine. Each event had a theme and invited participants to engage with the material in a highly interactive and embodied way. Our work of world building through immersive installation invited us to ask the question: what happens when we create worlds together on purpose and with care? As both participating artists and organizers of these immersive experiences, we found that there was something reparative in the immersion of this spatial and temporal embodied process that mere conversation cannot reach. It is through this transportive process of participatory art making that we see the potency of art as a tool for social change.
There is a lot in the works for this upcoming year at Sulis Studio, and we look forward to more expansion and cross-pollination with other artists and organizations in 2024!
Learn More: https://sulisstudio253.com/