Below Juliana Capes, one of the 2024 SSW x Counterflows Caregivers Residency artists reflects on her time here. This residency was set up in 2020 to expand funded residency opportunities to artists who are also caregivers.
Words and Images by Juliana Capes
—
In early 2025, I took part in the Caregivers Residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW)—a programme designed to support artists with caring responsibilities. Set in the rural village of Lumsden, surrounded by the foothills of Aberdeenshire, SSW has long been a space for making and reimagining. But this residency offered something rare: a structure where care wasn’t secondary—it was central.
What follows are reflections from my time at SSW, and a work in progress, Listening to Dust—a descriptive text piece shaped by the experience. I’m deeply grateful to SSW for the space, time, and care they offered me.
—
Care as practice. Care as identity.
Over the years, my art career has been like my child. Something I’ve had to care for. There’s been no manual. No predictable path. Just a lot of guesswork, and no particular thanks. But the reward is in its survival. The fact that it’s still here. That I’m still here, within it.
Art, in turn, has cared for me. It gives purpose, identity, grounding. It’s my lifeboat.
Motherhood came later and in some ways has felt much the same. A moment of clarity of purpose: looking into my newborn’s eyes and thinking, This is it. I’m yours. I’ll always have you. I’ll always have purpose.
The push and pull of caring and being cared for shapes me constantly as an artist and mother. It’s not comfort—it’s instruction. It teaches, defines, and tests. It is ongoing negotiation. A relentless, living practice.
—
The complication of care
Both of my children live with complex disabilities and require high levels of care. I speak of this carefully, to protect their dignity and privacy. Their needs shape every hour of my day—and every contour of my creative life. But I’m not unusual; many live with this intensity.
Caregiving is hard to talk about in a world where everything is meant to be “fine.” The expectations I once had—for motherhood, for a creative career—often collide with the daily demands of care. And yet, I’m lucky. This is a life of purpose, love, and responsibility.
But due to disability there is no clean break. No proper “maternity leave” or wrap around care. Just an ongoing, overlapping set of roles. For me to work or rest, someone else must step in. The care doesn’t stop. It just moves to someone else. .
Care shapes lives in this way. It limits what’s possible, and that should be acknowledged. The Caregivers Residency recognises this reality—offering not just time, but flexible funding to fill the caring gap that makes the residency viable for caregivers with a daily role. That’s rare and essential and I’m profoundly grateful.
—
Respite is work
For a carer respite is often an unobtainable goal, either through lack of funding or lack of available labour. Sometimes it feels like the effort it takes to have a break is not worth the break, it’s easier to just keep ploughing on and that forms a habit.
For me, respite usually looks like work. The hours between school drop-off and pick-up—where I can teach, collaborate, or make—are often my only break from care.
But the respite I found at SSW was something else. Work became sanctuary.
A ceramics studio: warm, dusty, filled with woodsmoke and wet clay. A communal table, shelves of alchemy. No pressure, no expectation. Just presence. Where you can press your palm into wet earth and feel the tension leave your shoulders.
That room, and the people in it, offered rhythm without demand. A softness I hadn’t felt in years. As warm and pliable as a bat of reclaim clay, a place where my hands could move and my mind could rest.
As an artist-carer, my pace is slow. And that’s hard in a competitive field. But even before motherhood, I knew residencies took time to bear fruit. Now I sit on a maturing ceramic egg. The words that follow are just the start. More will come— slowly—and I know that will have to be okay.
—
Respite is learning
As a carer having time to myself sometimes feels being haunted by an alarm clock —my nervous system on edge. Self-care feels strange, a habit lost, even a guilty indulgence, knowing that the work of care is still happening without me. Studio time can feel paralysingly excessive.
But at SSW, I found a different kind of self care. Respite as learning. One not driven by outcomes or urgency. A reeling brain can feel so full that it can be vertiginous to think of emptying it. At SSW I felt a parachute slowly unfolding as I was taught by fire geeks and mud techs, by process and play. A soft landing!
Respite was letting myself be curious again. Letting wonder in. Letting go of the constant why and what next.
To be excited about weaving words while my hands were busy and my eyes were smoky, learning new terminologies about old materials
Finding the centre of the wheel,
Fishing in the fire,
Witnessing smoky births,
Casting glaze spells.
Immersion. Joy. Reconnection.
—
Respite was also connection
I was overwhelmed by generosity—the people I met, the stories shared. Care was everywhere: care for others, for organisations, for communities, for practice. Sometimes as an artist caregiver it is easy to feel alone, so I found it important to position myself within a landscape, to connect.
It was especially meaningful to connect with another artist caregiver on the residency. It’s rare to find someone who understands the complexity of caregiving, who knows the difficulty of navigating the landscape. Who knows what it’s like to talk about how you support someone with a disability without wanting to centre yourself. How difficult it is to talk about it at all in a culture of toxic positivity. We shared the tension between needing to be seen and wanting to protect the dignity of those we care for. To share the tension between privacy and identity, vocation and visibility. Between care and career. Between self and “selfish.”
—
Back to reality
The Caregivers Residency didn’t offer me simple answers and in fact now I’m back I’m so immersed again in the caring landscape that I mainly have forgotten the questions! But it did offer a space for me—for grief, for complexity, for wonder. Not only a space to work, but a space that was gentle, flexible and open to support me as an artist and a carer. And It offered a structure built not around productivity, but around curiosity. Around connection. Around time spent.
I’m deeply grateful to have had this opportunity—my once in a lifetime lifeboat . There are so many carers, quietly holding everything up. They deserve this space too.
This residency proved that care and creativity are not in opposition. That they can coexist. That they already do, in me. I hope more organisations follow SSW’s lead. Care for the carers. We carry more than we show
—
Listening to Dust
by Juliana Capes
April 2025
On day one,
I sat with a bowl in my hands,
listening to dust.
A hurricane, spinning in stillness.
I didn’t know yet if I was seeing the big picture
or just tangling threads in my mind,
knitting lines with fingers around rims.
The clay felt like the edge of a leaf.
Dry.
Alive.
Fragile in a way that made me feel careful.
I remember the colour.
Not of paint, not of pigment —
the colours of something’s insides outside.
Of something shelled and private.
This wasn’t decoration.
This was powerful intent.
They said:
Followthe rim.
The edge.
The hem.
So I did,
until the hem crumbled to dust.
By day two,
I stopped fighting the process.
And let erosion teach me.
How things slump,
how they hold,
how water forgets and remembers
in the same motion.
My ripples hoped to make paths for flames.
I could almost hear them spit.
Could touch their weaknesses
Heaviness
Frayed edges.
I was afraid,
but fascinated.
I asked myself:
Is strength something you can build,
or does it grow in the cracks you can’t control?
Day three smelled like copper.
Iron under fingernails.
Celadon dreams.
Shino blushes.
The air in the kiln moved like it had purpose,
spinning gases like tiny planets around each piece.
Rutile turning purple under the right heat,
but not always.
And was that the point?
Reduction in the middle zone.
The rams head, the sweet spot.
You couldn’t point to it —
only feel it in the way the glaze pooled and cooled
like breath being held
then let go.
I started to accept that chance had a role.
That the universe might be a kiln,
not built to answer questions,
but to laugh at them.
By day four, I was charting my failures.
Every tile a tiny test of reaction.
Slip to dust.
Ribbon to ripple.
muddy puddles
Water made the form bend,
but fire made it strong.
I learned to write glaze recipes
the way you write spells:
measured,
hopeful,
never quite knowing if you’ll get the result you wanted.
I started thinking:
Could you learn chemistry
the way you learn people?
Can you map a pattern
between touch and transformation?
Day five was about symbols.
Runes on test tiles.
Pebbles that looked like planets.
Horn and crystal and bone,
holding memories of heat.
We called it divination —
reading the glaze
like you’d read smoke
or dreams.
Was it luck when it worked?
Or control?
We claim ownership of fortune and dissociate from our mistakes
Because we’re lucky.
Is colour just collateral damage?
They told me glazed ceramics sing as they cool.
I listened.
Tiny tinks.
Pings.
The echo of a process finishing itself.
By day six, I was gathering.
Honey, sea salt, table salt, moss.
Pine cones and sawdust.
Leaves from the courtyard.
Copper pennies.
Sea shells.
The studio was a community.
An ecosystem.
No one owned the outcome —
we all just sat in the pit.
Spoke to the clay.
Listened to the fire.
The more I learned,
the more I saw order and chaos coexisting.
Control and letting go.
“I am a natural material”
It all whispered,
“I’ll do what I want”
Day seven taught me.
That colour is sometimes
a byproduct, an aside and a gift.
That when you mix this with that,
sometimes the world responds
by singing. And sometimes it doesn’t.
But you still make the bowl.
Still follow the rim.
Still ask the question.
Because maybe that’s what it is:
Not finding control, but learning how to name the stuff
of the world as it changes in your hands.
