We are a family art collective who live, work and play in the shadow of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains where we practice and teach traditional and media arts, music, home-scale permaculture, and herbalism. We have worked Individually as Beth Hall, Mark Cooley, and Celia Cooley as well as collectively under various monikers for many years producing and exhibiting projects around the world including, FADO Performance Art Centre, Toronto; St. Louis Science Center; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The World Social Forum, Mumbai; MediaLab Madrid, Spain; The International Forest Art Center, Darmstadt, Germany, and many other locales. All considered though, perhaps our biggest commitment these days is working collectively and locally. Through our work together, we are intent on rejecting the notion that imagines a “balanced” life only by putting a fulcrum between our “professional” and “personal” lives, or pitting “career” and “family” against one another. Perhaps, built into the idea of a family art collective is a desire to redefine notions of work and success as necessitating alienation from a core social relation – the family – in its multitude of possible forms. SporaStudios is an attempt to weave together our collective interests in the visual arts, performance, ecology, permaculture, cultural studies, DIWO culture, gardening, herbalism, social and environmental justice, arts education, and of course – the art of everyday life.
It’s a big tapestry. We hope you like it!
Be well.
Beth, Mark, & Celia
