2023 Maine Artist Fellows

Belvedere Craft Fellow

Bobbi Tardif

Bobbi Tardif of Perry has always had a deep connection to the physicality of land and the important role of family. In November 2020, Bobbi and her family moved back to her hometown of Perry in Washington County. One of her fondest childhood memories was playing in the spring-fed stream behind her house. That is where she discovered glacial clay. She dug the clay with her hands, formed it, molded it, squished it between her fingers, and became completely fascinated.

It was the bond between material, manipulation, and self that led Bobbi to pursue being an artist.

Bobbi is an arts educator devoted to growing visual arts programming in public education within her community. Her positive outlook, spirited energy, and genuine care for others provide her students and community with opportunities to explore art in a variety of ways and see the artist within.

“Continuous learning allows me to analyze and think about my artwork in new ways, but teaching allows me to share what I have learned and who I am as an artist with others,” says Bobbi.

Knowing firsthand the impact strong arts programming can have on a rural community and on individuals, Bobbi began construction of her studio in 2021. The studio allows her to pursue her own artwork and offer valued art programming, including ceramics. Being in Perry and examining the geology of the streams, the ecology of the woods, the oceanography of the water, and forming new discoveries with this place is pure joy.

The Belvedere Fellowship, which is awarded to artists in Hancock and Washington Counties, brings Bobbi one step closer to making her dream a reality through the purchase of equipment for the studio.

Fine Craft Fellow

Erica Moody

Erica Moody of Waldoboro sculpts unique serving wares. The craft evolved from wanting to make tools that create connection and to focus on the intersection with the spirituality of sharing food. Her utensil designs are inspired by a variety of antique serving styles, traditional metal craft techniques, and minimal design and fabrication learned through collaborations over the last 30 years with artists, architects, and designers.

Erica’s process is to develop a conversation with the materials, mostly brass, copper, and steel, and create a purposeful simplicity with focused attention on human connection and haptic experience, enhanced by careful craftsmanship. Using refined and organic techniques, areas of texture emerge and become nuanced details that document the process while conveying an intimate sense of time, ritual, existence, and connection among the maker, user, and object.

Erica’s work transitioned into this phase when she moved to Maine in 2014, where she discovered inspiration and time in the spacious natural environment. She was deeply influenced by the intimate relationship communities have with sharing food, from how it is grown and the care of the environment to the families who grow it and how it is embraced in cooking pots and on tables. She also feels a connection to her family lineage and memories of farmers and cooks in the rural South, where recipes, seeds, and cookware have been passed through generations.

Visual Arts Fellow

Cole Caswell

Cole Caswell of Peaks Island is an artist whose home is tethered to an island off the coast of Maine. His work Rise is a photographic investigation of the coastal landscape in Maine that will be lost to sea-level rise. The use of the wet-plate collodion process allows Cole to make each image by hand while on location. The resulting glass-plate negatives are an accumulation of what it is like to be in a place and a tribute to a landscape that will be consumed by water and the rising ocean.

The artifacts and unique marks within the hand-poured negatives intrigue Cole. As chance-based additions, they visually suggest the faltering of the contemporary world, perhaps appearing as visions from memory, a dream, or a fleeting glimpse of what is at stake as the climate changes the places people hold sacred.

Cole sees the Maine Artist Fellowship as an opportunity to expand his audience, pursue new work, and add energy to his studio practice. Receiving the Fellowship fulfilled a major goal he had pursued since becoming an artist and settling in Maine.

Performing Arts Fellow

Brittany Parker

Brittany Parker of Rockport is a Maine-based theatre and music maker. She is the creator and lead singer of Bee Parks and the Hornets, an indie pop-rock band for families, and the Education Manager for the Strand Theatre in Rockland. She is passionate about the power of art to enhance daily life in rural communities and is interested in creating works of performance that appeal to all ages. Since moving to Maine in 2013, Brittany has co-created several original productions for intergenerational audiences.

Her work uses original music, puppetry, and audience participation to reimagine what it means to attend a show and engage with the magic of storytelling. Highlighting themes of empathy, equity, environmental awareness, social justice, and individuality, much of Brittany’s recent work has been inspired by Maine stories, communities, and issues. She frequently co-creates with a rotating ensemble of theatre makers and musicians who share similar artistic values.

The strong entrepreneurial spirit and vibrant artistic community in Maine inspired Brittany to begin creating her own performance works. The development of this work is closely connected to the people who live in the state, whose reactions and participation have influenced her as an artist and performer.

Brittany’s shows have been performed in theatres, libraries, parks, and schools, often paired with workshops in music, puppetry, and filmmaking. She has also toured to nine states and as far as Tottori, Japan.

The Maine Artist Fellowship helped Brittany build on new and existing solo performance works that had been stalled during the pandemic and supported her continued work with Maine communities.

Media Arts Fellow

Asha Tamirisa

Asha Tamirisa of Portland works with sound, video, and film and researches media histories. Along with several colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with gender and race in electronic music and art practice.

Asha moved to Maine in 2019 and presented a site-specific video installation for SPACE Gallery’s 2020 ReSite exhibition, a sound installation in Congress Square Park in 2021, a sound installation for Make Music Portland in 2022, and an artist residency at Hewnoaks Artist Colony in 2022.

Asha works with the organization TECHNE and has taught sound and media art at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Girls Rock! Rhode Island, and Street-Level Youth Media in Chicago. Asha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and is an Assistant Professor at Bates College.

Asha has performed at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and Bitforms Gallery in New York City, given talks at institutions including the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke College, and Oberlin College, and held residencies at Hewnoaks in Lovell, the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, Perte de Signal in Montreal, and I-Park Foundation in East Haddam.

Asha’s work has been mentioned in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics and the fifth edition of Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture.

Asha planned to use the Maine Artist Fellowship to build a sound and video studio in Maine and support the release of a full-length experimental music album in collaboration with Maine-based visual artists and audio engineers.

Literary Arts Fellow

Jeri Theriault

Jeri Theriault of South Portland was born and raised in Waterville, a mill town on the Kennebec River, where she attended Sacred Heart School with other descendants of the French-Canadian millworkers who settled in the area. Her father was a barber, and her mother was a housewife and bookkeeper.

She studied English and classics at Colby College, earned an M.A. in Instructional Leadership from the University of Southern Maine and an M.F.A. from Vermont College. She taught at Deering and South Portland High Schools for 20 years. A 1998-1999 Fulbright Teacher Exchange brought her to Gymnázium Arabská in Prague. In 2002, she became Chair of the English Department at the International School of Prague, a position she held for six years.

Jeri continues to write about her years in Prague, but Maine, her childhood, and her French Catholic heritage form the most consistent threads in her writing. Her characters, including her grandmother and mother, girl cousins, and aunts, are sometimes augmented by personae including Barbie, Demeter, and Coco Chanel.

The Maine Artist Fellowship supported travel, research, and residencies for her project with the working title Cemetery Stories, inspired by regular walks through Mount Pleasant and Bay View Cemeteries near her South Portland home. Her plans included visits to several Maine graveyards, including Saint Francis Catholic Cemetery in Waterville, as well as trips to Quebec and Nova Scotia to find the graves of ancestors.