Making Space For Community Art
As part of Women's History Month, we want to highlight the women in our community who are creating change. We are proud to feature our community partner, Trish Marshall, founder and visionary of Community Make Space located in the Marshall High Studios, another PAGE partner.
Stepping into Community Make Space immediately awakens your inner artist. A perpetually sun-lit wall of windows casts a warm, inviting glow across wide bespoke work tables, intriguing book titles in the resource library, and inspiring materials in The Makery; an area full of objects and supplies that are available for any studio participant to help themselves to. Trish Marshall, the founder and visionary of Community Make Space, greets you with an offer to put the kettle on and a tour of the space. Your eyes will rest upon storage lockers and flat files thoughtfully salvaged from storm refuse and secondhand spaces cleaned to a shine and a soundless close, a floor to ceiling cabinet with room for all of PAGE’s Stories From the Storm quilting materials, and, just through the little door in the back, the beginnings of a poetry parlor. As you move further into the space, to the left you’ll notice a soft settee and a wall that acts as both a spatial divider and a shelf for countless titles to lose yourself in. To the right, inks and solvents and a beautiful free standing printing press awaits a fresh vision to be offered up to its sturdy body.
Standing in the doorway with a quiet gleam, Trish shares,
​​
“ I come to printmaking from a writing background, so the long view vision is to have a poetry lending library here and to open this up and have small intimate poetry workshops. Even though this is the smallest part of what happens here and it’s still offline, it's where my heart is. It’s the thing that started everything else. It’s sort of like a matrioshka doll, right? The poetry parlor is inside a working journal book arts workshop, which is inside Community Make Space which is inside Marshall High Studios…”
​​
Everything Trish describes, much like the PAGE Program and its ecosystem, is individual, important in its own right,
and necessarily connected.
PAGE and Community Make Space are collaborating
in a number of ways this spring season.
As the Stories From the Storm Quilting Project moves into its next phase, Trish has generously offered a standing weekly time, Thursdays from 11:00-1:00, for sewists and fiber artists from all skill levels to gather around the quilted stories of Madison County residents. It feels apropos to be handling these stories together, stitching them side by side, just as we continue to lean toward one another and offer a soft space to be seen and supported. Additionally, Trish hosted our middle school After School students in Community Make Space in early March, leading them through a paste-paper making lesson. The group will return in April for a multi-media collage activity using the paper they created.
Beyond Community Make Space, PAGE is strengthening its partnerships with both Marshall High Studios and its residents,
including fiber artist Shirley Chambliss and High School Arts Teacher, Summer 2026 Story Lab Facilitator, and multimedia artist, Kirsten Davis. At the end of February, the high school cohort of PAGE students were invited to explore the rich tradition of fiber arts in Shirley Chambliss’ studio space. A weaver for over fifty years, Shirley lost her Main Street studio to Helene, but has since relocated to the MHS where she weaves for herself and inspires a new generation of students as well. While visiting Studio 107, PAGE participants practiced basic weaving stitches on lap looms provided by Berea College Craft Center before graduating to a full-sized floor loom. Here, they navigated pedals, a shuttle, and a beater to add their own rows to a collaborative PAGE sampler.
In June, Kirsten Davis will welcome the Summer participants into the MHS where they will learn how local changemakers use art to innovate places in our community. Offering on-site studio experiences across a variety of specialized art forms creates meaningful pathways for our students to explore and experiment, and to envision a future for themselves as creators, professional artists, and collaborative community leaders.
Just as PAGE, Marshall High Studios, and its residents celebrate the creative ingenuity of our community members and students, Trish is a self-described experimentalist. She leans toward trial and play, both as a means of circumventing roadblocks and as a way of interrogating art and form itself. Moving through the Community Make Space, this approach of
“I care about this, and I’m going to make it work” is present throughout the studio. There is a palpable blend of playful curiosity and intentional curation and in conversation with Trish, it is easy to see that Community Make Space is the inner world made real and accessible to the community.
Trish has been gathering people around craft long before she set up here at Marshall High Studios. In January 2025, four months after Hurricane Helene wrecked the shorelines and much of what sat along the French Broad River here in Marshall, Trish invited friends to her kitchen to share in the collaborative process of making. This group quickly outgrew her home in the Capitola Mill and expanded into the unaffected upstairs of the old Marshall High School, now Marshall High Studios.
Rebuilding efforts for Marshall High Studios came from far and wide, with Madison County High Schoolers helping to clear the thick mud that swallowed the first floor, relief funds PAGE was able to reroute to the space, Marshall Relief Alliance lending hands and funds to tear away and replace water worn and weathered walls, floors, and everything in between, and countless individual volunteers and donors across the country sharing what they could offer. This outpouring of generosity underlined Trish’s desire to offer engaging explorations in art free of cost, and birthed Community Craft on Mondays as soon as she was online in July of 2025. She reflects on this decision, sharing resolutely,
“Mondays just feel right. It was just something I was doing and now it stays on the schedule.
It’s part of what sort of defines the space”.
Hurricane recovery has taken on many shapes across the county and the region, and while there is still much to be done, community-focused groups like PAGE, Marshall High Studios, and Community Make Space are allowing their gaze to move beyond rebuilding and begin to dream and plan for ways to nourish those who have supported them. This Earth Week, PAGE is inspired to continue to contribute to the revitalization of the Marshall High Studios and its campus on Blannahassett Island through a service project initiative in collaboration with the National Honors Society. Outside the inspiring energy of the studios, students will thoughtfully replant the gardens that were destroyed in the flood with pollinator-loving plants and shrubs like echinacea, bee balm, and black eyed susans.
Whether weaving with Shirley, sewing with Trish, or blooming in the garden beds out front, PAGE is invigorated by our ability to firmly root into our community and local spaces, and to weave an ever-tighter fabric of reciprocity here in Western North Carolina.
“This was my strategy... to be slow evolving, and to allow things to come to be.”
We share Trish's commitment to be thoughtful and collaborative, to meet each challenge with determination and a renewed sense of vigor, and to center the ways we can continue to uplift our students and neighbors. We’re grateful for the opportunity to continue to grow our PAGE ecosystem, and for partners like Trish, Shirley, Kirsten, and Marshall High Studios who inspire us to connect creatively, both in and out of the studio and classroom.
