Mo Burki: Creature of Flight
Summer 2025 Artist-in-Residence
at Home ReSource
Molly, or Mo, weaving with wire fencing while in-residence.
Describe your Open AIR Residency experience. For example, how did you spend your time, construct your space, or engage with the community?
Life during my Open AIR residency felt like a pause in time. A moment stretched and stilled. A wandering daydream. I spent a lot of time moving. The gift of commuting by bike made mornings feel energizing and inspiring. I would make my way to Home ReSource, lay my one-too-many tote bags in my loft studio, and head back down the stairs to walk many a lap around the warehouse and the yard, looking for materials. As someone who loves to gather, collect, and gaze, working somewhere like Home ReSource , where something new appeared with each step, each day, was truly a joy. In moments of being stuck, a walk through the aisles of many doors, sinks, and hoses often helped ideas reconnect in my brain.
I spent much of my studio time wrestling with wire fencing in the end, but in the beginning, it was a whirlwind of materials that could be potentially used for weaving. It was certainly a shift in my practice to be using such large materials - and also to be making friends with materials that maybe initially weren’t called to be a basket form - so it ended up being a game of play to figure out if I could manipulate the material into something usable or if I had to let it go and let it live its life as something else. The ability to have a large space to work and large materials to use pushed me to chase ideas I had longed to pursue but didn’t have the means to.
Mo’s lofted studio at Home ReSource.
How did the residency-site, your studio, or the place influence or change your artistic direction?
The interesting experience of being in a lofted space with strange lighting let me chase shadows and play with the texture of light. These combined to push my work away from stagnant installation work - and towards explorations of movement and theatre - practices I’m now getting to engage in outside of the residency! After a day of making, my bike home along the river was always a cleansing ride, and often ended with an immediate return to the river’s edge. To read. To swim.
Molly attends Nikki Culley’s Cyanotype workshop at Garden City Harvest.
Can you share how the residency connected to your ongoing practice or opened new avenues for exploration?
When not immersed in my own brain - I was attending my fellow artists’ workshops. There is nothing more inspiring to me than engaging with others through their work, especially with hands-on experiences. It’s so intimate and vulnerable to share your processes and passions, and I feel endlessly grateful to have experienced art through the lens of others’ dreams. It is always refreshing to do work outside of your medium - almost like a jumpstart to your system to get out of your own head.
Getting to commune with my fellow artists, and their site partners, and Open Air staff through various events and gatherings allowed me the space to feel safe, to feel free. The many ups and downs that follow a creative endeavor felt manageable because I knew there were people willing to listen and who believe in my potential. Missoula is passionate about uplifting community in beautiful ways - and - I believe we can find these pockets for ourselves wherever we find our feet landing.
“not-quite-and-yet” by Molly, standing with her partner Ryan at Bob’s Your Uncle gallery.
How would you describe the evolution of your work, and how do you hope your audience perceives it? What keeps you returning to this subject, body of work?
In my work, I am looking to create connections. Weaving with a loom or basket making can be a solo experience but it doesn’t have to be. My urge has always been to use my sculptural work to create immersive spaces, where people can feel free to explore, to embrace the environment and the way they interact with it, to see how it reflects back to them. If someone looked at my work now, they would see a collection of interesting amoebic basket forms, skeletal and floating.
My intention is to engage in various forms of fiber art - felting, paper making, knitting, and weaving - to encase forms in thin layers of fiber. They will be lit from the inside. The main form, who can be wherever you need it to be (but to me it is a creature of flight), will be filled with various smaller basket forms, also adorned in light and fiber. I will then call on my community of beautiful friends and artists to engage in an act of movement and a plotless story guided by emotion, to create some form of short film of the movement of these forms, their emptiness and their fullness, as we use puppetry techniques to guide them through the grasses and the skies.
The group-made quilt coming together during Mo’s Artist Presentation
Can you share one specific, special moment from your residency?
During my artist presentation, I had the folks that attended take material of their choice from Home ReSource materials I had prepared, to create their own weavings as I spoke. To witness people weaving in the ways that they felt led, to see a whole room creating with their hands, touched me in more powerful ways than I expected. That everyone felt safe enough to do something new, to experiment, was so meaningful. People shared stories of textiles in their lives, so personal and touching. And by the end, we had this 20 square tall quilt full of creativity and individuality. It now hangs in Home ReSource, where it belongs, at the art of giving things new life.
What are you up to now (post Open AIR)?
In this future of theatrical basketry, I hope to continue to experiment and play. To be free in creating, for me, is to let go. Let go of the original technical ideas, of how I want it to be seen, of what it means to me, and let all of those things evolve.
I began as a loom weaver in school. But when access to looms and community became less available, basket weaving came into my life in such a magically timed way. It taught me to let the material speak, to listen to my instincts rather than force things into a rigid idea of perfect and right.
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
Mo leads the 2025 Summer cohort through the Moon-Randolph Homestead orchard
