Julie Nocent-Vigil

Over the last three years, I have been exploring sense of place in visual and poetic investigations catalyzed by professional development opportunities at summer educator colloquiums and studio courses at Santa Fe Prep, Santa Fe Community College and its Center for the Book. Santa Fe Prep has offered weeklong intensives on the “palette of place” and “poetry of place” that have rekindled and supported my visual studies as I begin as a new or renewed artist. Experiencing narratives here in Santa Fe, as interpreted too by guest lecturers of the Story of Place Institute, I have been able to reflect on my personal experience returning to the Southwest, my sense of genus loci, and reconsider the kind of research that I was drawn to in graduate studies, when studied different Native understandings of place and built environments as mapping cosmologies and ontology. These experiences inform my path in visual expression using mixed media and the book arts.