One of six new films from Art21’s fall 2019 programming

How deeply can a place permeate an artwork? A native New Yorker now working in Bali, Louise Despont shares how her adopted island home shapes her intensive practice, informing the devotional, meditative, and fragile elements of her drawings. “I know that the most important thing to make good work is time and space,” says the artist, “and living in Bali, that’s where I was going to have the most of it.”

While the spirituality of Bali aligned with Despont’s aesthetic, the tropical climate made her drawings vulnerable—a problem she solved with a dehumidified case. The artist herself was in a vulnerable place when she first arrived on the island in 2016, at the time of film; a long-standing relationship ended after they had moved to Bali together. “I wasn’t sure how I could make the work not being in love,” she says, but she soon found that her drawing practice sustained her. “Me in the studio with paper was there whether or not I was in a relationship.”

For her 2016 exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York City, Despont created an immersive drawing that imagines energy as a physical body, documenting its lifecycle from embryo to “a return to formlessness.” Conceptual artist Aaron Taylor Kuffner‘s gamelatron—a robotic version of the traditional Balinese orchestra, the gamelan—transformed the space into a sanctuary, and gave viewers the opportunity to, as Despont puts it, “travel through the drawings in their mind.”