January Director's Journal

Photo by Evan Benally Atwood captures Cordy Joan‘s quilting

As the year turns, residency season is underway at Sitka. With it comes subtle and sometimes seismic shifts that emerge when artists and thinkers are given space to be fully present.

It’s a hard thing to capture, this quality of attentiveness, but it is on full display in Sitka’s final Resident Talk of 2025, which continues to resonate as we step into the new year. Artists, culture bearers and interdisciplinary makers share works-in-progress shaped by fog, tide, tenderness and care. What emerges through their presentations is a shared orientation toward curiosity, toward relationship and toward the unrushed unfolding of meaning, deepened through creative exchange.

For those who wish to spend more time with these voices, the full conversation is available to view online on Sitka’s YouTube channel.

Filmmaker and stop-motion animator Kohana Wilson explores working with opacity and the value of what cannot be fully translated or neatly explained. Reflecting on grief, they share that “just as love has no true end state, grief also has no true end state,” a reminder that some experiences ask to be lived alongside rather than named, charted or contained.

Quilter and oral historian Cordy Joan describes their Transmissions Quilt Project as a way of marking becoming. Through what they call “arrival quilts,” Cordy and collaborating artists create works shaped by trust and care, stitched gestures that honor transition, identity and the quiet labor of becoming oneself. The photo essay at the end of this newsletter features images of Cordy’s quilting engaged in the Sitka landscape.

Writer Sam Sharp speaks about learning to write and to live inside uncertainty. “Imagination,” Sam reminds us, “is not a luxury; it is a necessity.”

Painter Heejo Kim reflects on tenderness as a way of relating that does not depend on clarity or control. Time at Sitka shifts her attention outward, into the forest and along the coast, reshaping how she understands connection between people, across species and throughout ecosystems. Care and communication, she offers, are living systems, always in motion.

The evening closes with a short film created and shared by Evan Benally-Atwood, taking us inside his residency experience at Sitka—a piece so attentive to this place that it feels less like documentation and more like presence itself. It offers a window into why time, solitude and creative freedom matter here—and everywhere.

This is the work that the Sitka community makes possible: tending the conditions that allow artists, ecologists, interdisciplinary creators and the creative spirit in all of us to listen deeply, to experiment, to reflect and to take creative risks grounded in place.

As we step into 2026, this spirit moves with us. A sense of wonder shaped by attention, generosity and care. An openness to what we don’t yet know. An invitation to walk forward together, eyes open.

Happy new year, 

Alison