AUG/SEP NEWSLETTER FROM THE STUDIO OF RAQUEL P MILLER

It’s happening!!

My duo show, with Esper Gaspardi, Memories to Give, opens in TWO WEEKS at 82 Parris!

We both cordially invite you to our opening reception on Friday October 3rd at 82 Parris in Portland, ME from 5pm-8pm! Our show will be up until October 24th and so hope you’ll be able to see the work we’ve made for this show.

I can’t believe this show is finally here and how quickly this year has flown by. Many of these pieces that will be in this show were made in residence at Black Seed Studio as a David C. Driskell Fellow at Indigo Arts Alliance in early 2024, and this past year in residence at SPACE Gallery, or in my home studio or at the Mill Pond Ceramics Studio.

This show explores grief, memory, and transformation. Through altars, shrines, and vessels, we are claiming space for our stories beyond loss. Our work is not about static mourning but fluid regrowth—honoring those who came before while forging and discovering our own narratives.

Esper’s pieces will be shrines achieved through different vessels ranging from recycled packaging and free form plaster. They are using recycled materials as an ode to the rasquache art form popular in Mexico, and their bisabuela who never let material go to waste. I will provide paintings on fabric, paper, and canvas while creating new work in clay as I investigate the altar as a space for burial (object), as window (lens), as portal (transformation), and as threshold (a space neither here nor there).

It was important to Esper and I to unite our work and to share the ways our work is manifestation of not only our grief, but of our life and dreams. In some ways, it was our attempt to remind each other of the ways we are transforming and evolving alongside our grief. The act of creating is the act of grieving, and it transforms us in ways that connect us to our dead loved ones, while also reminding us of our own capability for regrowth.

Memories to Give asks: what connects us to the world?  What connects us to the living and to the dead?  How do we breach that distance, fill the void, how far can we extend ourselves?  Does it ask us to release parts of ourselves?  Which pieces do we leave, what stays?  What do we carry with us forever?  

What if we made grief big instead of small?  What if we enshrined our life in grief as an act of love?  What would that look like?  What would you give?  Memories, dreams, stories?  What do you need to release in order to grow? 

We are all missing somebody.  We all have memories to give. We give by telling our stories and releasing ourselves from shame. We make grief expansive, we witness it, and we share it so that we can transform it and it can transform us.

My studio practice has looked a lot like: cutting up a massive curtain gifted to me by a friend who didn’t want to see all the fabric go to waste, laying it out on a tarp in the sun, hosing it down to paint wet on wet in my apartment driveway on a hot, summer day;  painting in my sketchbook on the steps of McArthur Library on the days that I can squeeze in a walk at work;  painting with pink, oranges, and brown to dream up clay vessels;   praying to the kiln gods that work I want to share for the show makes it out of the kiln in one piece;  practically dying my hand purple as I sprayed a liquid paint-like dye over fabric to create handprint silhouettes;  climbing up a 10-foot ladder in the hot sun to hang my 8-foot painting on the side of a barn at Broadturn Farm for Feastland 2025;  selling pots and paintings at Broadturn as an art vendor;   delivering vases;  multiple quick trips into the ceramic studio over the course of a week to paint slip onto my vase to prepare for carving;  creating slideshows to organize and layout our work for the show at 82 Parris;  writing this newsletter.  

I am so proud of this vase. I completed a four week class with Amy Larkin at Mill Pond, and she created a beautiful four week class that provided me with structure, guidance, and the confidence to create my largest pot to date, with one of my most ambitious designs. My pot is in the kiln as we speak.

Handbuilding feels attuned to my style of my making, and in this practice, I feel connected to an ancestral way of making. The process feels so tactile and grounding. It feels intentional yet limitless and I find this really exciting. I’m proud of the ways it came together in a way that feels almost effortless.

Above: Glazed clay altar pins.

Below: I participated in a Glazing workshop with my friend Isabella Rotman and learned how to use vinyl stickers in my glazing and underglaze decorating process. I’m excited for the ways this could come into my practice in the future, and I love what I made in the workshop.

FEASTLAND!!! I feel so grateful to have been asked to participate in this event with SPACE Gallery and Broadturn Farm. I was asked to provide artwork to display at Broadturn Farm for Feastland—a gathering fusing art, food, music, dance, sights, sounds, and sensations.

Most of the work I shared was created this year on large pieces of fabric. For this install, I ended up creating an entirely new piece, and one of my largest to date: an 8-foot by 9-foot fabric painting that I got to install on the side of a barn.

It felt so special to be able to share my work in an organic setting. My pieces were touched by the wind, lived under the stars, and warmed by the sun. And I was also able to set up as an art vendor for the event, and met so many beautiful and kind people.

I love seeing the way the setting sun casts a warm glow on my paintings. I love seeing the ways they live alongside the plants on the farm. I love seeing people dance below them. And I love seeing the ways that they move and flow in the wind. In some ways, it feels like these are precisely the spaces I want them to be. It’s so incredible to see a piece exist in a different space. Suddenly, what is big in the studio becomes small on a barn wall. Suddenly, once up on the barn walls and under the sky, they become alive.

So many thanks to SPACE Gallery and Broadturn Farm, and specifically to Meg Hahn and Kelsey Halliday Johnson for their support and encouragement throughout this process. I am so grateful.

Below: A rainbow, or iridescence, forms in the sky above my table.

My year has been so defined by the work in Memories to Give. It feels scary and exciting to be able to share this work at 82 Parris. It feels especially vulnerable, too. The work in this show has influenced my whole year and mindset, but really because my whole life has been so affected and transformed by grief. My work is almost always connecting with it, in the same way that I live every day affected by it, even if it is unseen. By creating and sharing this work, it is my way of witnessing it and communicating with others that it is important to me. It’s important to live my life, growing, evolving, and transforming, but it’s also important for me to honor my dead loved ones and their absence, and make space for them in my life through art.

I’m watching my life change while experiencing my grief evolve in ways I was not expecting, nor will I ever be able to. It feels surreal and exciting and sad and beautiful all at once. I feel grateful to be alive and to have my life full of love despite so much deep loss. I feel grateful to stay connected to my loved ones through my art, but also through relationships with my family and friends, and through sacred every day rituals that keep them close. Until next time.