In this column, we offer reflections from ACA staff members—what we are reading, what we are thinking about, how we address the balance between our work lives and our creative lives (and the points at which those intersect). We asked Jessica Hoos, who manages ACA’s special projects, to share what she was thinking about.
At ACA, much of my work revolves around process—how both creative practices and organizational rhythms unfold through steady, repeating gestures. Maybe that’s why I’ve been paying more attention to the things I naturally return to in my own life. I’m someone who re-reads and re-watches, compulsively and contently, settling back into familiar stories. There’s a comfort in that repetition, but I’ve also come to appreciate how it can be its own form of learning, each visit revealing something new.
I think that’s why Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries has been echoing in my mind. By reorganizing a decade of journal entries alphabetically, she surfaces patterns and themes that weren’t visible to her in real time. Her book reminds me that meaning often emerges not just from what happens, but from how we structure, sort, and revisit our experiences. Ceramics has taught me that, too. It’s a practice built on repetition: rolling coils, smoothing edges, allowing time for the piece to rest before continuing. In the studio, time slows down. Each step requires attention to small shifts and a willingness to begin again when something collapses or cracks. And then there’s the kiln, with its blend of heat, chemistry, and chance. I’ve learned to welcome the uncertainty and to trust that if something doesn’t work, I can begin again.
These habits—re-reading a book, re-watching a film, re-forming a lump of clay—have shaped how I understand confluence in my work at ACA. It’s the point at which repeated efforts, small adjustments, and multiple influences come together to form a direction or insight that wasn’t visible before. I see that especially in the daily work of supporting artists: the gradual layering of attention, iteration, and care that slowly reveals its shape. Confluence, for me, is the moment when returning to something familiar allows something unexpected to surface, in its own time, across the practices we revisit and tend.
Jessica Hoos is an interdisciplinary artist and arts worker based in Providence, Rhode Island. When she’s not in the studio shaping clay, she’s thinking about the role of attention, repetition, and community in sustaining creative practice across mediums. She holds an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University and has worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At Artist Communities Alliance, she works to support residency programs and the artists they serve. |
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