2025 Artist-in-Residence

2025 Artist-in-Residence Alan Baseden

2025 Artist-in-Residence, Alan Baseden

Alan Baseden lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania on the border with his home state of Delaware. He devotes time to art and to Jester Artspace. He founded his nonprofit in Brandywine Hundred, Delaware, to preserve a historic farmstead for the arts and community benefit.

Delaware is probably best known to outsiders for not being well known. He’s found enormous opportunity and good fortune in this. It is rich with scenic state parks, colonial history, cultural diversity, and a tight mosaic of human stories. It is also an untold tale.

He practices an art of visual storytelling, carving blocks of linoleum for printmaking, and scrubbing ink and watercolor into sketch journals. His linocuts currently spotlight the beauty of Delaware's public lands, historical interest, and local lore. His sketch journals range more widely, often depicting nature, but more typically engaging with the granular stories of local people.

He draws heavily from my years in the newsroom, and in the field, as an artist for the Associated Press, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times. It was on this unforgiving daily tightrope that he honed my visual and journalistic skills.

Today he teaches workshops at the Artspace in linocut printmaking, drawing, and animation. He also give occasional presentations about the Artspace and the nuts-and-bolts story of how he saved an infested, boarded-up, historic building from the wrecking ball, for the arts and the community.

 

2025 Artist-in-Residence Michele Pollock

2025 Artist-in-Residence, Michele Pollock

Michele Pollock combines her love of paper and stitching to express her fascination with the natural world and the difficult subjects of illness and grief. She gel plate prints on junk mail and recycled papers, then machine quilts, paints, and adds hand embroidery to create artworks that explore the natural world. Michele walks as often as possible in nature around her home, photographing especially the mushrooms, mosses and lichens, native plants and insects that make themselves known to us when we take the time to stop and look. These photos are the basis of the artwork she creates, whether she is hand embroidering directly into the photographs or using them to create patterns and designs for her paper artwork.

Michele holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and spent a decade doing research at 3M. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. As a visual artist, she was trained at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and relies on many traditional techniques from quilting and bookbinding, but she is self-taught in sewing and other fiber art techniques, constantly inventing new ways of combining paper, fabric and stitching in her studio. Michele's poetry and journaling are the inspiration for, or find their way into, her visual artwork.

Her work can be seen at www.michelepollock.org.