Artist Residencies at Purring Oaks

What’s Offered

Lodging

You’ll stay in our evolving off-grid container home:

  • 40ft converted shipping container (rustic, spacious, dry)

  • Composting toilet + solar lights

  • Woodstove or electric heater for cooler months

  • Simple kitchen setup (indoors + shared outdoor space)

  • Forest trails, open-sky showers, and a lot of birdsong

✨ This is a first-year offering — raw, beautiful, and in progress. You’ll help shape what comes next.

Meals

  • Residents provide their own groceries

  • Communal meal days are encouraged but optional

  • ✨ Want meals covered? See “Residency Paths” below.

Timeline & Duration

  • Residency length: 3 to 6 months (you propose based on your project)

  • Season: April–November 2026 (weather dependent)

  • Apps open: January 2026

Overview

Starting Spring 2026, Purring Oaks will welcome its first artist residents for 3–6 month immersive stays rooted in land care, creativity, and reciprocity.

This isn’t a polished, institutional residency — it’s an invitation into a shared experiment in slow living, co-creation, and tending something bigger than yourself.

Here, you won’t find polished studios or catered meals.
What you will find is 60 acres of woods, meadows, and possibility — and the chance to help shape a living ecosystem of art, care, and restoration.

Painters, builders, movement teachers, foragers, zine-makers, herbalists, and tender-hearted visionaries: this space is for you.

Create slowly.

Live wildly.

Give back.

A house with a garden in the foreground and trees in the background under a sky with a rainbow.

Contribution Model: Reciprocity in Practice

Purring Oaks is built on mutual aid, not extraction.
Every resident supports the land and community with their hands, ideas, and care.

Choose between two residency paths:

🌿 Basic Residency (Room Only)

15 hrs/week of contribution to Purring Oaks projects
Includes:

  • Garden support + permaculture projects

  • Trail building + forest care

  • Painting or natural building

  • Event help, altar tending, or project leadership

🌻 Full Residency (Room + Meals)

20 hrs/week = 15 hrs of land work + 5 hrs of a Legacy Project
Legacy Projects are your creative gift to the land + future residents. Ideas include:

  • Building a forest altar or tiny sculpture path

  • Hosting a weekly tea + somatic circle

  • Starting a zine library, herb spiral, or dye garden

  • Beautifying the container home with natural finishes

  • Teaching a gentle martial arts class for the local community

These projects leave roots for the next artists who arrive.
Every act of care becomes part of the ecosystem.

Who This Is For

We’re not here for hustle or polished resumes.
We’re here for alignment, reciprocity, and presence.

You might be:

  • A poet who paints altars

  • A somatic educator with a compost dream

  • A neurodivergent builder who sees possibility in decay

  • A BIPOC, queer, trans, disabled artist who just needs a safe place to land

This is a place to heal, to create, to rest, and to contribute to something that outlives you.

💌 Apply or Join the Early Interest List

We’re keeping our first year small — 2–4 residents max — so we can build with deep intention and care.

📝 Join the Early Interest List
📆 Applications open January 2026

Final Invitation

Build a forest altar.
Write poems in a moss chair.
Teach jiu-jitsu to the trees.
Let the land hold your vision until it sprouts.
This is your season of becoming.
We’ll hold the space with you.