Aurora Abzug, she/her

Philadelphia, PA

I came to Sable with the intent to make plein air still lifes, but ended up making lots of portraits of the other residents!

Fun fact- I’d never slept in a tent alone before my time at Sable!

Aurora is an emerging figurative realist painter making work that highlights the relevance of traditional modes of painting in expressing contemporary issues. Her work seeks new uses and contexts for classic genres and academic techniques, and applies similar thematic and formal devices to address contemporary and personal issues, such as eating disorder and mental illness, ubiquitous computing and consumer capitalism, and personal identity as a marketable commodity.

Aurora Abzug (b. 1997, New York City) received her BA in Studio Art from Bard College, and additional training in academic painting from The Ridgewood Art Institute. She has exhibited at such venues as The Salmagundi Club, New York, NY; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; New York Academy of Art, New York, NY; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL; Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, Solomons, MD; among many others. She is a 2022 resident at NES Artist Residency in Iceland, a 2019 AXA Art Prize Finalist, and a 2015 American Artists Professional League Future Art Master. She is based in Philadelphia and represented by MK Apothecary in Collingswood, NJ.

Ella Floyd (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Richmond, Virginia. Raised in Appalachia, Floyd left the foothills of Southwest Virginia to pursue her BFA in Photography at Virginia Commonwealth University. While at Sable, Floyd developed a site-specific installation, titled "Killmore," further exploring themes of Appalachian archive, nostalgia, and chemical interaction. When Floyd wasn't taking Polaroid pictures or using the typewriter, you could find her seeking out her next Maple Creemee!

Ella returned to Sable at the end of August to document the last week of the creative process and culminating performances of Water in the Wood by The Sable Ensemble.

Laela Huddleston (she/her) is a photographer currently working towards her BFA in photography from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a native of Reston, Virginia. Laela’s work is a self guided exploration into her memories, those that remain with her in waking moments, and others that need to be saved from the cusp of being forgotten. She displays these integral parts of her through site specific landscapes, well-known interiors, people, and diaristic imagery and text. During her time at Sable, Laela created cyanotypes informed by Vermont wildflowers, creating unexpected images caused by the influence of rain, dirt, and flower matter. She also connected with writing in ways she has not yet explored, and found herself up on stage during Food + Art Friday.

Laela used her time at Sable to reconnect herself with the earth, finding great peace and clarity through the land. She explored the practice of yoga and meditation through Iram, a fellow Sable resident, and found true community amongst her cohort and their dinners every night, plunges in the White River, and on wildflower walks.

Laela declares that the best sleepover she’s ever had was with her friends in the Sable kitchen, reading Alice and Wonderland aloud to fall asleep.

Anne Stiebing is a multimedia visual artist, educator, and long-time Sable community member. She works in primarily found and foraged materials such as riverbank clay, ferns, or wood.

Photos by Bex Love and Jaelyn McFadden.

Cate Duckwall (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Richmond, Virginia. A storyteller at heart, she brings narratives to life through the use of animation, writing, filmmaking, and visual art.

While at Sable, Cate spent most of her time practicing deep listening and observational drawing, making note of her own perspective of how she sees and experiences the world without distractions. These drawings and writings manifested into a series of letters that were sent out to anyone willing to participate in her experiment. All of this work was to supplement research for a larger video project surrounding the idea of entropy that occurs in a place and how that correlates with the spirit of the land.

In September of 2023, Cate will relocate to Berlin, Germany to work as a Production Assistant for a full-service virtual reality studio.

Jay Spencer (he/they) is a photographer and mixed media artist based in Richmond, VA. He came to Sable with the intention to create and experience life away from the daily distractions technology and society has for you.

At his residency, he worked on watercolor and oil pastel, gathered frequencies from plants to use as soundscapes with his photographs, and worked on personal journalism, self love, and his connection with the earth.

His work can be found at jayspencerphotography.com

Photos by Jay Stonefield

The Pandora Consort - Kendra Comstock and Angie Tyler - were Sable Guest Artists in June 2023.

They performed their work in progress at Sable’s Food & Art Fridays on June 28th, 2023.

The Pandora Consort ia an early music ensemble composed of young artists, Kendra Comstock (She/her) and Angie Tyler (She/They). Both graduates of the Historical Performance Masters program at the Longy School of Music, Angie and Kendra met and bonded over their love of singing early music and creating unique performances. The two have performed with the Boston Camerata, SoHIP, Newton Baroque, Ensemble 44, Seven Times Salt, the Concordia Consort, and other early music ensembles throughout New England.

The Pandora Consort aims to reimagine classical music performance with multimedia, interactive performance, and exploring historically under-represented music. The Pandora Consort is particularly interested in performing rare works by female early music composers.

In the Summer of 2022, the Pandora Consort premiered their program Vox Feminae with SoHIP Boston, which included works by Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda, Antonia Bembo, and Elisabeth Jacquet De la Guerre. This group was formed with the mission of creating accessible, modern performances of early music by supporting young artists of every medium to create relevant, innovative performances that can attract a wider audience.

In 2022, following their performance with SoHIP Boston, the Pandora Consort hosted the first ever Worlds Collide Series, bringing together Boston-based emerging musicians across all genres to create original compositions and fundraise for Massachusetts charities of their choice.

In 2023 the ensemble received a grant from the Anna Sosenko Assist Trust to perform Vox Feminae during the Boston Early Music Festival Fringe Series, and an Encouragement Award from the Mixtape Recital Series to support the development of a new program: The Witching Hour.

The name comes from the myth of Pandora’s box, and the human need to seek the unknown and echoes the mission of the ensemble to push the boundaries of what a classical concert is.

Photos by Jay Stonefield

Bolefuego - artists Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Daniella Barbarito - shared loud and clear at Sable’s Food & Art Fridays Performance Arts Series on June 305h, 2023.

loud and clear
Choreography and performance by Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Daniella Barbarito
Music by Daniella Barbarito
Costume design by Lexy Ho-Tai
Scenic design by Xinan Ran.

loud and clear is a performance piece exploring diasporic imagination and future folklore. What happens when folklore migrates? How do we celebrate resilience within the exhausting process of migrating? The work imagines a hybrid fictional and post-nationalist folkloric festivity inspired by immigrants and the vibrancy of Latin-American traditions such as tambores, calypso, the dancing devil of Yare, Naiguatá, and the Andean ekeko.

Artist Bios:

Miguel Alejandro Castillo is a queer interdisciplinary artist from Caracas, Venezuela. A choreographer, director, installation artist, educator, and performer, he is drawn to the permeability of art forms and the new inquiries that arise from cross-disciplinary and multicultural collaborations. His current research investigates diasporic imagination and future folklore. Through this work, he wields imagination both to discover what is true and to expand the realm of what is possible.

Castillo is a Fresh Tracks artist in residency at New York Live Arts and the choreographer for Prisoner of The State, a new opera by David Lang commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. As a dancer, Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning,

Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Alex Springer & Xan Burley, Peter Schmitz, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. In 2021 Castillo was a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna. He is also a company member of Agile Rascal Bicycle Touring Theatre.

Castillo is a proud United World College alumnus, holds a bachelor’s in dance and theatre from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College.

Daniella Barbarito is multi-disciplinary artist who was born and raised in Caracas and currently lives in Madrid. Her music reimagines Venezuelan tradition with a modern approach and deals with memory and identity with a humor, pathos and nostalgia that borrows from the bolero cannon. She accompanies herself on the Venezuelan cuatro, adding a touch of folklore to her post-modern sensibility.

Photos by Jay Stonefield

Arthur Larin (he/him) is a Signer Songwriter and Graphic Designer based in NYC. While at Sable, he wrote one and a half songs, performed daily vocal exercises, and rehearsed his repertoire. His new compositions were added to a list of original songs to be considered for an upcoming solo album. While the opportunity to focus on his musicianship was inspirational and fruitful, his favorite parts of Sable were the mindful way of life and bathing in nature (literally and figuratively).

Emma E. Pesin (They/She/He), from Coney Island, NYC, works in the following mediums: Drawer/Designer/Video/
Performance/Installation

Pesin takes a psychological approach to social expectations on how we are expected to act, think and feel. Through metaphysical philosophy they mock and embrace the faults of what make us human. Building cynical cosmic layers of emotional intensity and repetition to tear off what at the surface is perceived as normal but underneath the facade is a cascade of grit and grime, exposing it to be uncanny & warped. Turning intrusive thoughts into a surreal reality that’s mocking and mimicking the illusion of what truly makes us human.

At sable Pesin did two things: Draw as much as humanly possible, and perform their funeral.

Pesin’s drawings sourced inspiration from previous sketchbooks + writings that they had brought and poetically staring long and hard into the distance pretending to be profound to “find the answer”. One may say they pondered the ponder. At the end they gave birth to many drawings of all shapes and sizes.

Pesin also revisited a previous body of work inspired by the phrase “Holding a funeral for my Ego Death” by hosting their funeral, LIVE! It was absurd, surreal, funny, upsetting, personal, weird…and at the very end it took a group effort to finish burying Pesin.

Fun fact: I buried myself alive 3 times while at Sable and held 6 moths/butterflies.

Photos by Jaelyn McFadden, Sable 2023 Photo/Video Intern

Jaelyn McFadden (they, them) is a photographer, poet, and community organizer.

They joined the Sable Team this year to document both the 3rd Summer Residency and Sable Alumni Reunion.

Photo Credits: 1) Self portrait by Jaelyn; 2) By Sue Schlabach

Mackenzie Nye (she/they) is a Bay Area born dancer currently living and freelance dancing in Brooklyn, NY.

While at Sable she explored her perceptions of nuclear family through writing, reflecting, and embodied movement. Mackenzie created a solo while in residency that unpacked the relationship dynamics within her own family history.

Before moving to New York she was employed as a pine tree researcher in the Sierras. Although currently far from wide open spaces she maintains a deep connection to nature.

Photos by Jealyn McFadden, Sable 2023 Photo/Video Intern

Maeve McCool (she/her/hers) is an artist based in Catskill, NY, working in drawing, installation, fiber and printmaking. In her time at Sable, Maeve experimented with Batik fabric dying, drawing methods and led a Batik workshop with other residents. Maeve loved the Sable experience, particularly dancing barefoot in the rainstorms!

Photos by Jealyn McFadden, Sable 2023 Photo/Video Intern, and Jessica Lee.

Sue Schlabach
she/her
Plein air painter, writer and photographer
East Barnard, Vermont

I came to Sable to paint outdoors, but the summer of 2023 had other plans. I was on the hill during the great flooding of Vermont, which brought worry for my home and community located in the Broad Brook valley (which was mostly spared other than some significant road damage).

In my six days at Sable I found creative refuge in the stump hut studio where I coexisted with a nesting barn swallow who flew circles around me. I experimented with underpainting and tinkered with some textiles. I managed to paint for two days out in the garden with my easel (always keeping one eye on the building thunderheads on the horizon). I took a lot of pictures until my lens seized up from the excessive moisture (it has since recovered). I learned to paint in semi-darkness, trusting my instincts. I grew comfortable with little shelter. I walked in the rain, resisting the urge to run, finding four leaf clovers and one with five leaves. I did a lot more writing than I had planned.

My small cohort of six proved great company—along with Jessica and Maggie—to talk with into the night in the candlelit kitchen while rain beat down on the tin roof above us and rivers rose in the valley below. The sparks of ideas and generosity of encouragement made for a productive week during a challenging time.

Photos by Jaelyn McFadden (Sable 2023 Photo/Video Intern) and Sue Schlabach

Anna Chapman is an interdisciplinary eco-artist from Ohio. Passionate about the intersection of art, education, ecology and healing, Anna’s art is a quest for healing and interconnectivity in a time of socio-ecological destabilization.

While at Sable, Anna taught her fellow cohort how to make charcoal in a tin can in a fire. Anna also made a number of drawings, some of which she pasted to Sable’s walls as a gift before departing.

Photos by Sam Sheppard, Jessica Lee, and Anna Chapman.

Avi Diamond (they/them) is a singer/songwriter from Pittsburgh, PA. While in residence at Sable, Avi wrote a new song inspired by the Bluebeard folktale in Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

Photos by Sam Sheppard and Jessica Lee.

Sam Sheppard is a print-maker, artist-producer, educator, and community facilitator who lives and works in New York City. Much of Sam’s creative practice until now has been dedicated to experimental collaborative performance, to movement-based exploration, and to facilitation of playful, collaborative exchange.

At Sable, Sam dove into print-making and and creative prompts, and included fellow cohort members in her practice.

Photos by Jessica Lee and Sam Sheppard.

EmmaGrace Skove-Epes

Photos by Jessica Lee and Sam Sheppard.

Vic Fulton

Photos by Sam Sheppard.

Marcus Jade performed at Sable’s Food & Art Performance Art Series on July 28th, 2023.

Marcus Jade is a blues musician, songwriter, and poet. Born and raised in Indiana, his exposure to a wide variety of music has informed his diverse musical influences, wherein he discovered his own unique style of ragged, heart-wrenching blues.

Since moving to New York City, he has developed a laser focus on his love for blues music. A renowned presence in the Brooklyn music scene, he has performed hundreds live shows ranging from intimate living room performances to well-attended music festivals.

His music reflects this duality, mirroring his fluctuations between the wilderness and the city, community and solitude. His sound is simultaneously as intimate as a whisper and as universal as a smile, both warmly communal and blisteringly solitary. It cuts to the heart of blues, staying true to its roots while seamlessly incorporating modern elements of folk and rock and roll.

Jade sings for the lonely and the lost, the furious and the eternal. His music is medicine for the wandering mind, redemption songs for our modern times, and his live shows are utterly transportive, mystical in their power and cleansing in their emotional intensity.

Who is Berto (they/them) ? A returning Sable ensemble performer and former Sable team member, here to bring the ruckus, the biscuits, and the berry compote. Berto plays with dance, song, pencil, gouache, yarn, and yearning. They live with their lover Emma and cat Luciano Stompziano in a third floor walk up (with a very cute porch) near the confluence of the Allegheny & Monongahela rivers: aka smoggy ol’ Pittsburgh, PA.

Photos by Ella Floyd.

Bex Love (they/them) is a @contentclown, performance artist and musician originally from Pittsburgh, PA. In their work, they are interested in giving gifts through performance, and exploring how the absurd can reveal deep truths about the meaning of it all!

Bex is also Sable’s Community Engagement Organizer! They worked hard this season to connect with Sable artists, audiences, and local Vermont community members to bring people together.

Photos by Jealyn McFadden, Sable 2023 Photo/Video Intern.

Emerald Peake is a visual artist, chaplain and student of life and death. They currently live between Philadelphia and New York City. They returned to Sable this year after being an artist in residence in 2019.

Photos by Ella Floyd.

Jessica Lee (she/her) is a dance artist, community organizer, arts administrator and educator who calls VT, NYC, and CT all home. As Sable’s Director of Operations, Jessica holds the archive and vision of Sable for all who come to experience its magic. She is a shaper of space and choreographer of people in space, designs systems of care for community, and practices the art of gathering.

This year as part of The Sable Ensemble, Jessica has become an assistant director, quilter, production manager, and strategist.

Welcoming artists to Sable and making art in collaboration are some of her greatest joys. She is grateful for this 10th Season of Sable.

Photos by Jealyn McFadden, Bex Love, and Ella Floyd.

Sable Ensemble Director Kern Samuel (he/him) is an artist and educator who lives and works in New Haven CT. His work explores the history and practice of painting though not always adhering to traditional painting mediums.

Photos by Ella Floyd.

Nicholas Quazzy Herd comes from the land of Cinema Classics, 90’s-2000’s Hip Hop, Crate digging, sound engineering, filmmaking, and digital edits. He always uses his hometown address of Saginaw, Michigan for anything really dear to him. He loves New York and as much of his business there, and has dreams of living outside of the United States one day. His art includes writing and yoga philosophy. His favorite numbers are 7 and 13, and he lives with his son, Panther.

Quazzy was a Sable artist in residence in August 2015 and returned to Sable for the first time eight years later to join the Sable Ensemble.

Photos by Ella Floyd.

Otto Pierce is the founder and Creative Director of The Sable Project. Primarily working with wood, he builds functional spaces for performance and living and community gathering, as well as figurative and abstract sculptures. His is better know as dada to Màiri, and “my baby daddy” to his gorgeous partner Sara (she may or may not actually call him that). This is his second season with the Sable Ensemble, and he is blessed to be able to spend three weeks with these incredible, talented artists creating Water in the Wood.

Photos by Jessica Lee and Ella Floyd.

Panther Jamir-Wray Herd is from the land of Brooklyn, New York, and reps Spider-Man and Sonic as some of his favorite heroes. His favorite number is 500 and he paints, makes crafts and helps design projects. He has worked in ensembles and plans to be a scientist in the future. He lives in Saginaw with his Mom, Dad, Grandparents, and other family members and friends.

While at Sable, Panther collected rocks, broke them into crystals and set up a store to sell his finds at Sable’s Food & Art Friday. He also enjoyed playing around the Sable land with his new friends Màiri and Ella.

Photos by Ella Floyd.

Sophie Larin’s artistic mediums are playwriting, comedy writing, filmmaking, sketch comedy, improv, needle crafts, tailoring, costume design and construction, and puppeteering.

Photos by Jessica Lee.

Sarah Liebau’s mediums are dance and film.

Photos by Bex Love.