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ceramics | sculpture | participatory art

Art is how we learn to belong.

I am an artist and educator whose research explores participatory art, creative lineage, and community-based making as pathways to learning, confidence, and connection.

bethmateskon

My research and studio practice are grounded in participatory art, creative lineage, and community-based inquiry. Through long-term projects that combine storytelling, movement, archival research, and collective making, I explore how artistic knowledge is transmitted across generations and how creative confidence is formed through relationship and place. These projects include archival studies of creative origins, walking as artistic methodology, cyclical mandala-making rooted in seasonal rhythms, and narrative profiles of artists and cultural stewards whose stories invite others to begin creating. Together, this body of work forms an integrated research program examining art as a relational practice that fosters belonging, reflection, and sustained engagement with making.

Latest Project

Creative Lineage and Community Origins
Founder of Mud Wisdom | Michigan

Project on deck

Creative Lineage and Community Origins

Origins and Creative Lineage

This research draws on oral histories, narrative accounts, and lived experiences of artists working within the Michigan and surrounding regional art communities. These accounts are treated as distributed cultural knowledge, rather than as representations of any single institution or formal organization.

Participants’ stories are positioned within a broader inquiry into creative lineage formation, examining how artistic practices, values, and identities are transmitted across informal networks, mentorship relationships, and shared making environments. All references to specific organizations have been intentionally removed to preserve participant confidentiality and to emphasize the decentralized and relational nature of artistic knowledge formation.