24-Month Resident

Our 24-MONTH Artisan Resident Program — provides concentrated practice and full immersion to process design through Artisan Projects—focused programs—which provide a stable foundation to practice 10 Finger Thinking—learning through practice, that we can all engage the basic elements of designing and building from conception to fabrication to practical application. Participants may take their Project home upon completion or leave it in the Gallery Shop to be sold to benefit Artisan Lab programs and future residents.

Apprentice Meg learning how to TIG Weld.
Apprentice Meg — TIG Welding Power !!!

10 FINGER THINKING

Our 24-MONTH program is ideal for those who want a full immersive opportunity to practice ‘making a life with their hands’ and are considering seeking a long-term occupational commitment. With guidance from staff mentors, you will learn through direct experience alongside our 3-Month and 9-Month Residents. Participating in the Artisan Lab community you will discover capacities which you never imagined possible—were there waiting to be discovered.

Artisan Lab believes expanding capacities is best accomplished through direct experience. There are no curriculums, speeches, SAT or IQ tests or ringing bells to ‘stop this and do that’. From the beginning, you learn ‘your proof is in your pudding’—that your cause creates your effect. While staff mentors will support and encourage you through the program—you must embrace personal responsibility to transform inevitable errors and missteps to success earned through dogged personal investment. You will gain capacity and confidence—the root of 10 Finger Thinking—as you grow through the perennial Artisan’s dance of trial and error. What Richard Sennett describes as the ‘problem finding and problem solving’ making evolution supported and tempered through challenge.

Artisan Lab’s active learning model is evocatively based on the apprentice / journeyman master craftsman model—though it departs the historical gender bias to honor and serve craftswomen and men. There is also the sense that the more competent the master the less he imagines anyone to be capable of mastery. We embrace the hubris of creating a flexible and responsive learning environment fueled by equitable collaboration. We learn from each other by listening and learning and practicing patience to increase rather than diminish our attention spans.The prize we are engaged in winning is growing the habit of collaborative cooperation.

Staff Mentors and Residents engage in a fluid confluent practice of questions, suggestions, and help each other visualize and imagine all the ways a thing can be made, sharing experience and prior knowledge gained through their individual experience.

The 24-MONTH program awakens and builds participant skill and experience through a series of separate but process, tool and material related projects. The overlapping project experiences builds a reservoir of polymathic imagination as well as self and collaborative capacity. Though participants are encouraged to bring their own—all tools, materials, and supplies to complete the projects are provided.

Residency Application

  • MM slash DD slash YYYY
  • Beginning with your most recent job, please explain briefly. Please provide more than one work experience.
  • List any skills or experience that you feel is related to Artisan Lab's programs.
  • Have letters of recommendation sent to: Artisan Lab Attn: Dan Weaver 115 South Gouldsboro Road, Gouldsboro, Maine 04607 OR Send via email to: dan@mainekilnworks.com
  • Please submit two letters of recommendation from employers, teachers, or other non-relatives who can speak to your character and your personal qualities. One letter should be from an employer or teacher and the other can be from a personal source. Please ask whomever is writing your letters to follow these instructions: (YOUR NAME) is applying for a Residency at Artisan Lab, a hands-on multi-media creative educational facility in Gouldsboro, Maine. He/She will be working in a richly creative environment with access to equipment and supplies in many medias, learning both traditional and modern processes. He/She will be heavily self-directed in his/her work, while also working alongside and learning from 1 or 2 other experienced craftspeople and occasionally working with groups of students. You have been asked to provide a reference speaking to the contributions this individual will make to Artisan Lab. If he/she is accepted, the reference will become a part of the individual’s file. In a word document or PDF please tell us: 1) How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant? 2) Describe the applicant's work ethic. 3) Do you think the applicant is truly interested in a residency at Artisan Lab? 4) Describe how the applicant interacts and communicates with others.