[piano intro] [brooding music] [brooding music continues] [flint striker clicks] [torch pops and whooshes] - [Anne] From a very young age, I was always interested in art.

I was always the black sheep, and I loved to look at encyclopedias and find a picture, and I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate those things into a sculptural form.

- [Cristina] I love experimenting with clay, so I'm always looking for what else can the material evoke.

I became interested in this idea of matter in relationship to time and what remains and what is lost and what is transformed.

- [Hoss] I think the journey can feel... Like any relationship, there's some kind of connection, and there are sparks in that connection.

I thought about my work as I was the conductor, but I've realized that I'm not really the conductor.

I'm just in there as part of it.

- [Anne] North Carolina is a place I never thought I would end up.

- [Cristina] I think North Carolina is so diverse and so interesting, and this environment is also so specific to a unique culture and a way of summoning creative energies to kind of uplift.

- [Hoss] In a way, living here on this property has sort of become my palette.

- I really do feel like North Carolina is my home, and this is where I'll die.

And I wanna be burned on a fiery pyre on my property.

[Anne laughs] [serene music] [wind whistles] [birds twitter] [serene music continues] - Western North Carolina is a pretty remarkable place, especially for artists.

Taking that first drive up the mountain, then come up through that tunnel of leaves.

And then you come around the corner.

You have that emotional release when you see the big meadow and then campus.

Penland has existed for 95 years, and this arts and craft community is the most robust community when it comes to self-supporting artists, in the United States.

- Many of the artists may've come to the school in the first place in order to be a student or an instructor, but what they discovered when they got here was this place that held them strongly in a way that made them feel comfortable in their studio practice, made them feel like they could expand without judgment.

And I think that the people who've stayed in the community are people who share those values.

[vigorous country music] - I live here with my partner and my English mastiff, Dill.

[Anne laughs] Wipe the goobs.

My name is Annie Lemanski, and I am a full-time studio artist.

I feel like my work and life are very intertwined.

My studio is right outside my door.

It is a two-story studio built from shipping containers, so everything is right here on my property in a four-acre package.

It's quiet.

It's green.

It's an incredible environment to live and work.

I walk this path like clockwork, and I love to watch how just this, you know, scraggly little spot changes throughout the seasons.

I'm very tuned in to the environment that I live in every day.

I watch birds build nests that take days to build, and they lay their eggs.

And then a snake comes along and eats the eggs, and it's just, like, this comedy and tragedy.

[laughs] And that is what feeds into my work, that sort of contrast.

[flint striker clicks] [torch pops] [torch hisses] - Some artists tend to hold themselves back, because they make what they know.

Annie's not one of those people.

She's flying without a net most of the time, which I think is what motivates her to excel.

It's like, "Have a vision.

Pursue the techniques that you need in order to make the vision work."

- I've always been very sculpture-minded, 3D-minded.

I've never had a desire to, like, paint or draw or anything like that.

My brain thinks three-dimensionally.

- When I first met her, she was making these wire-form armatures, and I'd never seen anything like it before.

And I realized that she had a really unique vision.

She has an uncanny ability to move a line through three-dimensional space.

She draws with the wire in the way that you might draw with a pencil on paper.

- I make an armature, which is this wire form, or skeleton, that is the base of all of my sculpture.

And then I collage imagery onto it.

Collage is my true happy place.

It works my brain in a very different way than the sculpture does.

I just start playing around with images.

I have been a collector of 2D, graphic ephemera for decades.

There's always a push and pull between the images that I choose to lay down.

I like there to be this juxtaposition.

I like there to be a little irony.

I like color to be involved.

I remember one of the first pieces I made was a pistol that I stitched vintage valentines onto, and it was called "Love Is a Loaded Gun."

[laughs] That was after a divorce.

[laughs] I mean, every piece was, like, a learning curve, and it'd all feed back into itself.

The collage becomes the sculpture, and the sculpture becomes the collage.

- Her breadth of media is expanding, but has been very wide from since I've known her.

She's going to be making larger and larger work and more-ambitious work, and I think it's really unlimited what she's capable of doing.

[birds twitter] [tentative music] [water burbles] - Reinterpreting this idea of the figure, it's such a strong metaphor, and I think it runs the risk of being interpreted really directly.

And so I'm really excited to do things that are unexpected, so that it helps us question this idea of the body.

My name is Cristina Cordova, and I am a figurative ceramic artist, originally from Puerto Rico.

[plastic rustles] I've been working with clay as a primary medium for almost 25 years.

[trees rustle] The figure came into play very early on.

I was trained as a dancer, and I also grew up in this religious imagery, through Catholicism, in my family culture.

And so the language of the figure and the metaphor of the figure became, like, a key vehicle for expressing this emotional range of ideas, narratives, associations.

- I have a early memory of walking into Cristina's studio.

She had a young daughter at the time, who was working with some watercolors and a paintbrush, who had spilled it over, and Cristina was hyperfocused on what she was doing.

And I knew at that moment that that was somebody who could be so singular of vision.

It's hard to describe exactly how skilled somebody's work is until you're standing in front of it.

I'm moved by her work every time I see it.

[dazzling music] - I live here with my daughters, Eva and Paloma, [labyrinthine music] and my partner, Ian, and I'm here because of one of the programs that Penland offers, which is a three-year residency.

In Puerto Rico, it was, like, a very distinct, close-knit culture, and honestly, I always thought I would go back.

But once I found my way here, I felt that North Carolina offered, you know, that kind of echo of this really grounding space that I could call home.

And once I came, I never left.

Yeah, come.

This work is stemming from this experimental phase.

Usually, when I'm starting a new creative wave, I like to have something that's just [tuts] really emotionally connective.

Time and time again, my daughters have been that bridge.

Right now, this wave of experimentation involves creating things and then collapsing them, exploding them, breaking them, and then finding a way to reconfigure them, less interested in very specific rendering and more taking echoes of real life and, through different treatments of the material, evolving them into this different conversation.

And so it's playful, and it's exploratory, and it's exciting right now and also very [tuts] anxious about because it's uncharted territory.

[glowing music] - I never wanted to be confined by techniques and tools, with a fear that they might start to dictate what I make.

I'm Hoss Haley.

I built the studio that we're sitting in, and I've been doing this for 40-50 years.

I was trained as a blacksmith, but I found that, over time, the scale of what I was trying to do just didn't translate well, and that's when I began building these hydraulic presses so I could push the metal around instead of banging on it.

The problem with machines or technology of any kind is that it can start to dictate what's happens.

By building the machine and also building the tooling that goes in it, it becomes a much more integrated part of the process.

And so I'm not dependent on what it can do, because it can always change.

[touching music] - What Hoss does is, like, first off, he makes working with steel look effortless.

Despite the scale, he's pretty fearless about moving material, and he's confident.

You know, he knows what he's doing with the work.

But I would say that what he is brilliant at is creating a fluidity in a form that has been distilled down to its core elements.

- Growing up in Western Kansas on a little farm, I tend to think of things very sparely, and I tend to work reductively, where that idea just has to be reduced and reduced until... Hopefully, you get to that essential truth, I guess.

[steel clanks] A sheet of COR-TEN steel, to me, is like a sheet of plywood.

It's not special at all in its nature, but I get to take that material out and do something with it that might be interesting, and it doesn't always work.

I'm really driven by failure.

[cozy music] - Hoss, as an artist, is completely consumed, and I mean that in the best possible way.

He doesn't live in that space of worrying about what might not work or how it might fail.

He launches himself completely into the space of finding out.

- Within failure, there's a glimmer of something else.

And that's a hard thing to have faith in, that there's a nugget of an idea floating out there that can come from a walk or a dream or something you see that's unrelated but it sparks something.

Get that stick.

It's like it's wandering out in front of me and I'm trying to keep it in sight and catch up with it but not overwhelm it.

It's a funny dance.

It has been hard, but I'm happy to come out here every day and engage in that struggle.

[luminescent music] - Living out here is not always convenient.

In order to survive and be successful, you just have to be very self-motivated and very driven.

- Being a full-time artist is an emotional and financial roller coaster.

You have to have a very thick skin.

You know, there's a lot of rejection involved, [switch clicks] applying for grants, projects, applying for everything.

[switch clicks] It is never easy.

- There were periods of crisis, where what had worked before was not working.

I had run my wells dry.

Conceptually, the techniques were tried and overworked.

[glowering music continues] Needing to find yourself over and over and over is something that we all learn, I think, through this fire of [laughs] despair sometimes.

- I think it's really easy in our world to look at somebody from the outside and think, "Oh, they've really got it figured out."

There's always doubt.

There's always insecurity.

There's always feeling like you're not doing enough or you haven't pushed it far enough or you haven't taken your career far enough.

He has those days, like everybody else.

[insubstantial music continues] - I'd remember having a very low point, where I was sort of trying to conjure the greater beings out [chuckles] there to answer that question of "should I just go get a job?"

I think, deep down, success is if I come into the studio and I leave at the end of the day feeling like I'm at least heading in a good direction, that I've either discovered something or I've completed at something.

And oh, it's like hiking, you know?

It's like, "Oh, I made that.

I've finally got to that ridge, and that feels pretty good.

I know there's another peak ahead of me, but for now, for this moment, I get to relish in that I made it."

[rollers rumble] - I think I subscribe to this idea of the lone craftsmen, and I didn't understand that, really, we, as artists, need to work in community.

[gleaming music] - I'm a bit of a recluse, but there's something about being here in this rural area that just makes it a little more tight-knit.

Friends are there when you need to, like, get out, you know, have a beer, have a talk, have a walk.

It's an underlying, you know, [laughs] organism.

[Anne laughs] - I think Penland creates the container that has brought up that sense of closeness with different people that is very precious to me.

There's that kinship off the bat that binds us together, and I think it creates a synergy.

Where your knowledge or expertise ends, somebody else's begins.

Then you can really reach out and find support in ways that, I think, are essential to continue down this path.

- Being here, there is a support network that has kind of sprung up.

They've figured out how to make a life out of this, how to make a business out of this.

It might not be the most lavish lifestyle, but it's a very satisfying and very rich lifestyle.

[glimmering music] [indicator ticks] - For me, it was a goal to have a large public artwork.

It's a very difficult door to get your foot into, and there's a huge pool of competition.

Here we are.

And I had a previous project that was very far along in the process that fell through.

It just kind of devastated me, and I just... I dunno, I just kind of made up my mind that the public artwork piece wasn't going to happen.

And then this project came along.

We are standing in Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I never in a million years dreamed that my first piece would be in a place like Dix Park.

The title of her is "Sophia Fortuna," which translates loosely to "Wise Luck."

As an artist, seeing your work in a spot where more people can interact with it, it's, like, a dream come true.

One of the reasons that I make art is to have a conversation, you know, create a conversation.

It all came together so beautifully.

I'm now looking at my work, like, all of my smaller sculptures, as being sort of maquettes for potentially larger pieces, so it's changed the way that I'm actually thinking about my work, you know, sort of as a whole.

I hope this is just the beginning of the next chapter of my career.

- In the world we live, we're constantly buffering so much.

It's not an easy feat, you know, to kind of quiet and understand really what has the most weight.

I've been longing to create these spaces for connection and cultural exchange.

My responsibility is to continue to attune to these ideas that have power and energy.

That's what I feel I wanna continue doing, and that's driving my creative momentum right now.

- I've been doing this a long time, and now that I have these two workspaces, it's really kind of a place to check in with myself.

I look back over my career, and I think there was a time when I felt like I really had to be in control of the whole process.

I was always looking for something that took the process out of my hands a bit.

[drawing machine buzzes] The feeder that powers the drawing machine is set up with four switches.

Two switches run each axis: up and down, back and forth.

So as the birds land on each of these perches to feed, then that will activate a direction on the drawing machine, very much like you would have with a Etch A Sketch, so I'm just setting up the parameters for something to happen.

It's kinda giving in, taking myself off of center stage, and becoming more of a facilitator and letting those ideas kind of be generated outside of me.

Even this far in, I'm just not done.

Never once felt like "okay, I'm done with that."

And it may be a fool's errand, because I get up every day thinking, "Maybe I'll get to that next peak, and there's still something to explore."

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