Ari Fish

Ari Fish was an Artist-in-Residence at Prairieside Outpost in October 2018. She is a Kansas City-based multidisciplinary artist. Ari used her time at Prairieside Outpost to explore the sixth temple in her ten temple series. The temples sometimes take the form of a room-sized installation and sometimes as words, cloaks, or robes. Fish constructs her own mythology through her multiple interpretations of what prayer and devotion mean. She attended the residency with her family.

I went to PCO in hopes of capturing inspiration for my sixth temple, Latch, Comfort Measures. I was able to gather field recordings, to make sketches of prayer robes, and to sort out the logistics of my next temple, all while moving in a new rhythm that was required of the space and the surrounding area. While there, I got to explore the history of the town and the surrounding area and become better in sync to the prairie, of which I have always grown up around, but never in with the sort of powerful stillness that the residency afforded me.

My residency at Prairieside Outpost gave me an invaluable experience of making art alongside my daughter. To be able to take my daughter to the residency, cook for her, have her work alongside me, it was incredible. I have always had my studio space within my own home for convenience reasons, but to be able to reside in a designated space for art making, a safe space for my daughter and me (especially in the middle of my second pregnancy) gave me pause and allowed me to put perspective on my goals as an artist, as a mother, and as a partner.

Ultimately, the time spent at PCO deeply implanted a sense of stability in me as a practicing artist and as a mother. Though there was a large breadth of time between my residency and the installation of the sixth temple, I was able to look back at my time there as a beginning point of a sense of freedom and certainty as an artist and single mother of two. In PCO, I think I found my power, and for that I am so grateful.