Time is Material

Creativity Explored. San Francisco, California, USA.

Most educational spaces compress time. Whether it’s a semester, a training period, or a curriculum designed in advance, the rhythm is the same: time is tightened so achievement can be demonstrated. Progress is measured by how efficiently someone moves from not knowing to knowing, guided by instructors who already know the destination.

Supported studios are educational spaces in that people gain knowledge, and the know-how to use it, through the facilitation of others and the surrounding environment. However, they work differently than most educational settings. They must work differently.

People enter these studios with sensory profiles, interests, communication styles, and ways of perceiving the world that don’t fit neatly into predetermined timelines. Growth responds to curiosity, material relationships, bodily rhythms, and the personal ways each artist encounters what they don’t know and gradually untangles it into something they do.

This means supported studios carry something uncommon in modern life: a long arc of time for learning and growth set at the pace of one’s internal rhythm.

Time here stretches instead of contracts.

When I think about places that truly understand long-term time - places where practice accumulates over years rather than weeks - my mind drifts first to monasteries, convents, Buddhist temples, and other contemplative communities. These are environments built around the idea that learning and becoming take as long as they take. A person may stay for a season, a decade, or a lifetime. The point is not arrival, but devotion to a practice, slowly and deeply. Time stretches outward, and meaning emerges from repetition, attention, and presence.

There is, however, another lineage of stretched time that cannot be ignored. Historically, some institutional settings also created a form of long-term time: psychiatric hospitals, long-term residential centers, asylums. People remained for years, sometimes a lifetime - but not by choice. The similarity ends at duration. Institutional time is long, but it is not necessarily contemplative. It offers structure without intention and presence without possibility.

This contrast matters, and it deserves care. Grand expanses of time are not inherently virtuous, and the history of institutionalization is neither simple nor uniform. In many ways, it reflects how societies have understood - and often misunderstood - the needs of people with disabilities across different cultures and eras. I’ll explore these complexities more fully in the future, but it is important to acknowledge here that institutional time and contemplative time share only their length, not their purpose.

For now, the essential shift is this: supported studios treat time not as something to get through, but as something to grow within. This is foundational to any long-term creative practice.

Supported studios are educational environments where the curriculum is not a set of predetermined outcomes, but a long-term relationship with curiosity, material, and agency.

A practice of contemplation and creativity at a human pace, with time as its inherent material.