LAWS is a nomadic art residency designed to support artists facing urgent displacement or disruption. Whether affected by climate-related crises such as wildfires and floods, housing insecurity, loss of studio space, or other unforeseen contingencies, LAWS provides artists with the time, space, and support needed to continue their practice when it is most at risk.

Built around the principles of Learn, Attune, Work, and Share, LAWS recognizes that artistic practice is not only a form of cultural production but also a vital means of adaptation, resilience, and community-building. Rather than being tied to a single location, the residency operates nomadically, responding to emerging needs and forming partnerships with host organizations, communities, and cultural spaces wherever support is required. Our two initial initiatives took place on the small island Björkö in Norhern Stockholm Archipelago and at P ( sorry don’t remember the full name or exact location, please add as you read)

At its core, LAWS seeks to reinvest in trust, care, and hospitality as essential cultural infrastructures. In moments of crisis and uncertainty, artists often lose not only physical space but also access to the networks, stability, and support systems that sustain creative practice. LAWS responds by creating conditions of welcome, reciprocity, and mutual care, recognizing that meaningful artistic work flourishes when people feel supported, connected, and safe.

Whenever possible, LAWS selects residency sites situated in tranquil environments that encourage reflection, restoration, and meaningful exchange. These settings are chosen not as places of retreat from the world, but as spaces where an ethos of trust and care can be cultivated. By slowing down and creating room for sustained encounters, LAWS fosters peer-based learning, dialogue, and collaboration, enabling artists to build relationships and share knowledge across disciplines, experiences, and geographies.

LAWS offers temporary refuge for artists to reconnect with their work, learn from changing environments, attune to new contexts and communities, and share knowledge, processes, and outcomes with others. In a time of escalating climate uncertainty and social precarity, LAWS seeks to create an agile and responsive infrastructure of care for artists, ensuring that creative practice can endure, evolve, and contribute meaningfully to the challenges of our time.

Artists selected for LAWS become part of the LAWS Alumni Program, an ongoing network that extends beyond the residency period. The alumni program fosters long-term connections between artists, hosts, curators, and partner organizations, creating opportunities for continued collaboration, peer support, and professional development. Alumni may also be considered for future exhibitions, public programs, and special projects organized through the LAWS network, ensuring that the residency serves not only as an immediate response to crisis but also as a catalyst for sustained artistic visibility and growth.

LAWS is not simply a residency; it is a framework for artistic continuity, mutual support, and collective resilience—one that reinvests in trust, care, and hospitality while enabling artists to learn, attune, work, and share through times of change.

Susannah Mills, director of LAWS artist, based in LA and Joshua Tree, US.

Artist Susannah Mills attended BKN following the full loss of her studio, work, and community in the CA Eaton Fire in January, 2025. Her experience in Björko was revelatory amongst a group of international artists and with the guidance of Anna Viola Hallberg an artistic healing happened. The art practice she developed shifted into something deeper and tapped into new talents. Mills learned how to make paper, uncovered an instinct for creating installations, and found her path forward. She also felt called to share this gift to others who experienced this devastation.

On the last day of her stay she proposed an idea to Anna Viola to bring other artist survivors from CA deeply affected by the fires. This dream has become a reality. With the help of artist Rick Gradone she created “The Los Angeles Wildfire Residency”. Twelve artists from the fires will be at BKN in Sept and Oct, including photographers, filmmakers, writers, painters, sculptors, poets, actors, research artists and dancers. Their goals are both individual and collective, with the culmination of their efforts showing in galleries in Stockholm and Los Angeles called Lucid Dreaming/Lucid Dreams.

While at BKN Susannah will be of service, helping the artists actualize their artistic dreams and producing workshops and symposiums. Mills also intends to learn photographic printing to continue her exploration of artistic processes that transform destroyed/abject materials into new forms.

@susannarama

www.susannahmills.com

Pilchuck Glass School residency, Sept 23-Oct 7 – Washington State.
Team list to be updated.

Susannah is an artist, grief counselor and curator.

She is dedicated to set up programs lectures, exhibitions for artists in flux. Susannas practice is connected to recovery and healing. Susannah about her own practice “My work as a painter is a stream of consciousness process resulting in symbolic, semi abstract imagery populated by spirit beings in dream landscapes and cities. My art is directly connected to my work as a death doula and relates to the deep psychology of death and rebirth of life and spirit, and how human relationships make life come into existence.”

Prior to dedicating her time to help other artists and the making of her own art works she worked in the film industry.

@susannarama

www.susannahmills.com

Rick Gradone

Rick is the co-curator of the Los Angeles Wildfire Residency and a painter and sculptor. He holds a BA in Art History from Fairfield University where he studied painting independently with Peter Michael Gish. Over the years he has participated in residencies at Creekside Arts in Humboldt, CA, Belgrade Art Studio in Serbia, and La Wayaka in in Chile. Gradone was actively involved in relief efforts around the Eaton Fire in the days and months that followed and continues to support those efforts today.

Gradone’s work explores the recognition of the Earth as an all-powerful god figure and creates iconography for this based on rocks. As the slowest changing and most stable form of theplanet, rocks hold the history of the planet and reveal the tiny place that humans hold in its vast timeline.

Concerned with the spiritual aspects of our relationships to each other and the planet, he will address the precarious balance of these dynamics in an era of climate change in his work at this stay at BKN.

@rickgradoneprojects

www.rickgradoneart.com

Anna Viola Hallberg, 1 on 1 session

Anna Viola  is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work spans video, installation, photography, text, and socially engaged practices. Her research-driven approach explores themes of memory, public space, identity, and collective narratives—often at the intersection of private and public spheres.  The interest has shifted from agency towards  weak resistance and weak avant garde. Hallberg works across disciplines and geographies, addressing social justice, migration, and governance through immersive and collaborative formats. Her practice extends beyond the studio into site-responsive interventions, residencies, and public programming. Her work emphasizes dialogue, process, and art as a space for critical reflection in later years she has embarked on exploring metaphysical aspects of space and body as a vessel for knowledge especially for  walking as artform. 

She holds a BA in Cinema and Curatorial Studies from Stockholm University and an MSc in International Museum Studies from the University of Gothenburg, Hallberg is the founding director /curator of BKN/Björkö Konstnod  (2020-2025) and co-founder of AiRS/Artist in Residence Skövde (2014-) and WAP/Walking As Practice (2023-).
Hallberg lives in between Mariestad and Stockholm, Sweden.

Located in Washington State.

Pilchuck Glass School is located on the ancestral homelands of the Skagit, Tulalip, and Stillaguamish tribes, who continue to thrive and who are the contemporary custodians of the land where our campus is situated. We honor the ancestors and respect the elders of the past and present of these tribes.

Pilchuck does not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, nationality or ethnic origin in employment or in artistic or educational programs.

The Artist in Residence Program is one of the pillars of the Pilchuck Glass School educational experience. From the beginning, Dale Chihuly’s vision of artists teaching artists inspired an international exchange of ideas that brought in perspectives beyond the glass community. 

The Artist in Residence program was born from this vision, and every session since 1980, when the Artist in Residence program officially began, Pilchuck invites noted artists to experiment with glass on campus. Paired with expert glass fabricators and artist assistants, residents can experiment with glass in their practice and add it to their vocabulary of work. For the Pilchuck student, the Artists in Residence bring much to the campus learning experience, including different approaches and unique interrogations of the material. 

The Artists in Residence program has brought many established artists of other mediums to learn about glass including alumni like Judy Chicago, Magdalene Odundo, Kiki Smith, and Maya Lin – sculptors who have continued using glass in their work.

Kari Reardon-Campbell
@ohhhshute

Kenturah Davis
@kenturah

Michelle Garduno
@howtofakeasmile

Derrick Harlan
@xbeerx

Linda Hsiao
@lindahsiao

Annie Marini-Genzon @annie_marini_amgart

Sunny Mills
@sunshine_acid

Camilla Taylor
@camillataylor

September-October, 2025 – Sweden

Susannah is an artist, grief counselor and curator.

She is dedicated to set up programs lectures, exhibitions for artists in ecological flux. Susannah about her own practice “My work as a painter is a stream of consciousness process resulting in symbolic, semi abstract imagery populated by spirit beings in dream landscapes and cities. My art is directly connected to my work as a death doula and relates to the deep psychology of death and rebirth of life and spirit, and how human relationships make life come into existence.”

Prior to dedicating her time to help other artists and the making of her own art works she worked in the film industry.

@susannarama

www.susannahmills.com

Rick Gradone

Rick is the co-curator of the Los Angeles Wildfire Residency and a painter and sculptor. He holds a BA in Art History from Fairfield University where he studied painting independently with Peter Michael Gish. Over the years he has participated in residencies at Creekside Arts in Humboldt, CA, Belgrade Art Studio in Serbia, and La Wayaka in in Chile. Gradone was actively involved in relief efforts around the Eaton Fire in the days and months that followed and continues to support those efforts today.

Gradone’s work explores the recognition of the Earth as an all-powerful god figure and creates iconography for this based on rocks. As the slowest changing and most stable form of theplanet, rocks hold the history of the planet and reveal the tiny place that humans hold in its vast timeline.

Concerned with the spiritual aspects of our relationships to each other and the planet, he will address the precarious balance of these dynamics in an era of climate change in his work at this stay at BKN.

@rickgradoneprojects

www.rickgradoneart.com

Anna Viola Hallberg
Curator BKN 2020-2025 >>>
Curator WAP 2023-

Anna Viola  is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work spans video, installation, photography, text, and socially engaged practices. Her research-driven approach explores themes of memory, public space, identity, and collective narratives—often at the intersection of private and public spheres.  The interest has shifted from agency towards  weak resistance and weak avant garde.

Hallberg works across disciplines and geographies, addressing social justice, migration, and governance through immersive and collaborative formats. Her practice extends beyond the studio into site-responsive interventions, residencies, and public programming. Her work emphasizes dialogue, process, and art as a space for critical reflection in later years she has embarked on exploring metaphysical aspects of space and body as a vessel for knowledge especially for  walking as artform. 

She holds a BA in Cinema and Curatorial Studies from Stockholm University and an MSc in International Museum Studies from the University of Gothenburg, Hallberg is the founding director /curator of BKN/Björkö Konstnod  and co-founder of AiRS/Artist in Residence Skövde. Hallberg triangulates between Stockholm, Björkö and Mariestad, Sweden.

BKN is located on an island in Norrtälje municipality, Sweden.

BKN= Björkö Konstnod. An art node in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago. It’s a costal region covered with almost boreal forest. It’s a quiet place only some 350 people live across the island. It’s connected by a bridge to the mainland and is 2 hours north east of Stockholm. The public transportation for greater Stockholm area brings you to the doorstep. If you come directly from Arlanda Airport it takes about the same time. Björk in Swedish is birch and ö island, so yes you will see them every where along with aspen but more so you will encounter pine, heather and spruce. Moss and kitchen are much appreciated aspect of the nature here as well.

The darker half of the year you have a chance to see aurora borealis and from May the days are rapidly getting longer towards midsummer. It’s a four season climate with some snow in the winters and 15-20 degrees during the summer. In 2020 BKN was founded in two former school buildings, wooden structures that are over 100 years old.
Resources include, in addition natures offerings, black and white darkroom, loom, sawing machine, wood shop, beamer, speakers etc. During the first five years BKN had over 200 artists.
More from BKN >>>

Video & Installation – Bridget Batch

Writing – Kira Cook

Photography – Kevin Cooley

Dance Performance – Jasmine Albuquerque Crossant >>>

Writing & Book Making – Merrill Feittell

Painting/Sculpture & LA Curator – Rick Gradone

Photography – Alfred Haymond >>>

Symposium & Improv – Brian Huskey

Sculpture – Justin Lieb

Painting & LA Curator – Susannah Mills

Research Based Art – Wren Petrichor Ossman

Filmmaking & Painting – Chris Pack

Conceptual Art – Jane Szabo >>>