The shipping container compound was the second studio at A-Z West (my studio for the first three years was an outdoor workshop, on the patio behind the house) I liked the idea of using containers because they are so ubiquitous here in the desert — though they are also wildly impractical and took many years to hone into truly functional spaces.

When the containers functioned as my studio we would store materials and completed artworks in the left container, the middle container contained my office and an area for working with textiles, and the right container had the woodshop. There wasn’t much room inside the containers, so we mostly worked outside on the patio, which was of course extremely hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was rare that we were able to put in a full eight-hour day, and when we had a lot of works waiting to ship out to a show they would have to be stored on racks outside on the patio. Trying to protect fragile artworks from the fierce windstorms, rain, hail and even snow, was always an incredibly nerve-wracking undertaking. (I was so happy when we finally built the new large studio)

Now the shipping container compound contains several well-organized storage for different parts of A-Z West, the middle container has two small apartments for our work-trade residents, and the right container houses a chicken coop with pigeons and bantam chickens (a bit of nostalgia for back in the 1990s when I first started making art and my work was breeding bantams). The courtyard is also my personal garden area and is fertilized with the compost generated by the encampment.