Pat: From the beginning, my work has been about exploring the space between. From 1995 to 1997, I studied in London, Paris and Helsinki and received my Master of European Studies in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Design in Helsinki.
My thesis project, “Skinning the CATTt,” looks into the space between and concludes, “In the end, all we have are the moments, the details. We watch as they are absorbed by the paper, as they slide between blank pages. The details are more than a magnified view — more than fragments of the whole. They are the lines, the tales, that open to all boundaries at once.”
Reading Douglas Hofstadter and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gives me another way to look between. The difference between Hofstadter and Deleuze is: Hofstadter sees likeness while Deleuze sees difference. I attempt to see both while visualizing the unseen.
I was first fascinated by Bell’s theorem in the early 1970s, now called quantum entanglement. It still is at the top of my interests — how we are all connected, not only in the moment but throughout time. What is time that it allows such an interconnectedness?
My work since 2005 has been about mapping patterns. When beginning my work with PATTERNS I asked my grandson Morgan, age 3, what he thought a pattern was. He thought for a few minutes and said, “Things that go on and on.”
It is the movement and evolution of these patterns that interests me. Looking back at my own evolution, reaching out and returning, I see the movement of the Möbius twisting and turning.
I am now looking for connections: the movement between, patterns of place and patterns in time — between my last two bodies of work Patterns of Place: Isomorphic Map Tables and Patterns in Time: becoming… being.. disappearing. I see the tree house itself as an installation of becoming, being and disappearing. Visiting our virtual tree house studio is to explore a space between art and architecture grounded by a site.
It also may be like exploring a swamp: “A place of mystery, of enchantment, of danger, where liquid sounds hang in the mist. The swamp is not like a mountain range or a sunset that might be loved from a distance. You must be in the midst of the swamp — sense its dangers — to know the enchantment of its presence. The swamp is a place for passive activities — watching, listening — allowing something to be done to us. The swamp is a place of non-symmetrical reflections — where trees are indistinguishable from their roots — a place that is alive, aware — a place of origins, of contradictions, of coexisting processes that enliven each other.” — from Skinning the CATTt
The whole tree house acts as the studio in a similar way.
My family moved to Alabama from Charleston, South Carolina, when I was 5. My father, an architect and acrobat, encouraged fun, play and questioning. Part of my quest for fun included exploring. I would hike these magical hills and remember discovering a place with natural springs and waterfalls known as Booger Hollow. I still remember a moment when my heart leapt with joy.
At about 10 years old, I was walking a tiny path along the steep side of a flowing rocky mountain stream, light rippling on the water, shadows and spring breezes playing with the sparkling green leaves. I remember pronouncing it “my favorite place.”
Years later when I walked this property looking for a place to build, my heart knew right where it was. It is where I continue to play and create, falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
Photo by Peter Frank Edwards
One of the first things I learned to do was to fall. From the time I was a small babe, my father would hold me high in the air. I can still remember the fall, always to be caught by strong hands just before hitting the ground. I still remember the trust I felt in the fall.
The fall is another way to travel through the space between.
In 1975, in collaboration with architect Julian Jenkins, we designed and built the tree house, which contained my studio as well as the family home for my husband, Guice Potter, Jr., and two children, Guice III, who was age 12 at the time, and Julee, age 9.
The front entry to the tree house is across a 75-foot bridge at the third level. One may descend the three-story stairwell moving through levels as a way of falling down the rabbit hole following a “spinal hinge” reaching a projected wonderland in a tiny, mirrored room at the bottom of the stairs. The tree house does not intrude upon its environment. It looks as if it grows from the forest rather than being placed on it. There’s a relationship among all involved: trees, birds, animals, the work, the people, all connected in these interwoven processes of life.
The tree house is a magnetic force attracting the energies needed in the studio. Each space takes a symbiotic role in the creative cycle: places to study, read, rest, gather ideas, stretch the mind, ease the mind, stretch the body, ease the body, places to gather. We like to change the level or the room in which we work or gather to perform, discuss, think and engage within the different vitalities of each space.
artXarchitectureXstudio creates various forms of art, ranging from architectural installations to three-dimensional assemblages — sculptural reliefs — to handmade and digitally printed books. Assemblage, in our definition, refers not only to matter but to concepts and ideas. Painting and drawing are also common in the studio; we use sketches, drawings and digital prints as a part of our communication with each other and as a way to develop ideas.
We are drawn to natural materials, wood, branches, leaves, vines, moss, tree bark, rocks, bones, shells, and found objects from the forest. Beveled glass, broken glass, metal, and treasured items that have been collected throughout time may be incorporated. We access a wide variety of media for our works and enjoy experimenting with manipulation, such as burning Tyvek or oxidizing metals. Our materials — collected through the years and selected from collections of the past; found fragments of nature and fragments of art — might work their way into an “emerging assemblage.”
Energy is reciprocal and we feel our work emerges from the energy of this place and time generating energy back into it. The materialization of our ideas and concepts happens in the studio on the lower level which extends to an outdoor work area. Both look like that swamp we mentioned earlier.
My story is a tale of becoming, being and disappearing. I am now in the third stage — disappearing. In teaching architecture studios at Iowa State and Auburn University, I found that I enjoyed having younger people around and sometimes could see them taking my critiques and carrying through my concepts further than I could. It made me want to have a studio that worked like an architect’s studio, one where the architect does the design and artists are around to help with the carry-through. My work over the past 20 years has operated in this manner.
After studying and teaching in Europe and the U.S., I returned to Anniston, Alabama, asking myself, “Why am I here?” I remembered Picasso’s words: “[The artist] can only rediscover what has been lost, forgotten and misunderstood.”
Alabama is certainly such a place in need of rediscovery. Working in collaboration is both an opportunity and a challenge. There are many differences in one’s being and our way of understanding each other. Coming together from a different place and time increases the vibrational energy within the work dynamic and encourages a different method of creating. This method can especially champion elder artists to continue their work.
Jesse W. Akers has worked with me since 2018. A 55-year age difference exists between us.
Jesse: I didn’t start as a collaborator. I had artistic inclinations and practiced often, but I still had much to learn and always will. It was absorbing Pat’s practice and principles, what influenced her ideas and connecting these processes or methodologies, that would prepare me to evolve and assemble our concepts. Coming from a surrealist background, I had to lean my mind into an idea of abstraction or what Pat considers a “visual philosophy,” a place my mind didn’t so willingly go.
Even in two dimensions, we see a direction into a depth that bridges the viewer to a motion or path revealing these greater patterns.
When I joined the artXarchitecture team, there were processes of becoming, being and disappearing happening in the development of our shared endeavors — myself in a new environment, new challenges, new difficulties, a cycle of growing and decreasing, knowledge and doubt, a shift in roles — where I would take on a more direct approach and see my collaborator adjust to a different way of working. Work that brought a new way of constructing ideas.
Pat: Our studio operates on many architectural principles and uses a method of layering to create concepts. We document and archive as a way to preserve layers and come back to them as points of expansion. In essence, our studio is a place for serious PLAY, EXPERIMENT, not knowing what the outcome will be. It is truly the space of the question.
Most walk in and see a world of total madness where we see a place to make the impossible, possible. There is a liberation in creating; play or experimenting is a part of that freedom. Even our animals, my cat, Merlin, and Jesse’s retired racing greyhound, Salvador, engage in our play and creative energies in the studio.
However, it is not all play, much of our work requires a degree of engineering and problem-solving, something more technical, more analytical. At any given moment, there are many cogs turning and being a part of the team requires you to “wear many hats.”
I love Deleuze because he tries very hard not to tell you what to do or think and that is collaboration at its best. It is important in our work that we don’t tell you how to think or see, but present possibilities.
I consider myself a translator — a map maker. I read many books at one time and translate what I read into images. Images are another language, one more collectively understood by the whole.
The space between the map and the territory continues to appeal to me in that the imagination must travel beyond the surface to connect the two. Our work often becomes something of a three- dimensional map and might be seen as an architectural model.
Observing and translating into the language of art is not looking at a surface, but into a multi-dimensional abyss of ripples, reflections and repetitions, something that emerges into the landscape of our world.
Although the future will give us imaginary portals into many virtual realities, we want our work to be grounded by a SITE in the real world. That is what our tree house studio, here in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, is for us and for anyone who would like to come for a visit.
Pat: From the beginning, my work has been about exploring the space between. From 1995 to 1997, I studied in London, Paris and Helsinki and received my Master of European Studies in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Design in Helsinki.
My thesis project, “Skinning the CATTt,” looks into the space between and concludes, “In the end, all we have are the moments, the details. We watch as they are absorbed by the paper, as they slide between blank pages. The details are more than a magnified view — more than fragments of the whole. They are the lines, the tales, that open to all boundaries at once.”
Reading Douglas Hofstadter and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gives me another way to look between. The difference between Hofstadter and Deleuze is: Hofstadter sees likeness while Deleuze sees difference. I attempt to see both while visualizing the unseen.
I was first fascinated by Bell’s theorem in the early 1970s, now called quantum entanglement. It still is at the top of my interests — how we are all connected, not only in the moment but throughout time. What is time that it allows such an interconnectedness?
My work since 2005 has been about mapping patterns. When beginning my work with PATTERNS I asked my grandson Morgan, age 3, what he thought a pattern was. He thought for a few minutes and said, “Things that go on and on.”
It is the movement and evolution of these patterns that interests me. Looking back at my own evolution, reaching out and returning, I see the movement of the Möbius twisting and turning.
I am now looking for connections: the movement between, patterns of place and patterns in time — between my last two bodies of work Patterns of Place: Isomorphic Map Tables and Patterns in Time: becoming… being.. disappearing. I see the tree house itself as an installation of becoming, being and disappearing. Visiting our virtual tree house studio is to explore a space between art and architecture grounded by a site.
It also may be like exploring a swamp: “A place of mystery, of enchantment, of danger, where liquid sounds hang in the mist. The swamp is not like a mountain range or a sunset that might be loved from a distance. You must be in the midst of the swamp — sense its dangers — to know the enchantment of its presence. The swamp is a place for passive activities — watching, listening — allowing something to be done to us. The swamp is a place of non-symmetrical reflections — where trees are indistinguishable from their roots — a place that is alive, aware — a place of origins, of contradictions, of coexisting processes that enliven each other.” — from Skinning the CATTt
The whole tree house acts as the studio in a similar way.
My family moved to Alabama from Charleston, South Carolina, when I was 5. My father, an architect and acrobat, encouraged fun, play and questioning. Part of my quest for fun included exploring. I would hike these magical hills and remember discovering a place with natural springs and waterfalls known as Booger Hollow. I still remember a moment when my heart leapt with joy.
At about 10 years old, I was walking a tiny path along the steep side of a flowing rocky mountain stream, light rippling on the water, shadows and spring breezes playing with the sparkling green leaves. I remember pronouncing it “my favorite place.”
Years later when I walked this property looking for a place to build, my heart knew right where it was. It is where I continue to play and create, falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
Photo by Peter Frank Edwards
One of the first things I learned to do was to fall. From the time I was a small babe, my father would hold me high in the air. I can still remember the fall, always to be caught by strong hands just before hitting the ground. I still remember the trust I felt in the fall.
The fall is another way to travel through the space between.
In 1975, in collaboration with architect Julian Jenkins, we designed and built the tree house, which contained my studio as well as the family home for my husband, Guice Potter, Jr., and two children, Guice III, who was age 12 at the time, and Julee, age 9.
The front entry to the tree house is across a 75-foot bridge at the third level. One may descend the three-story stairwell moving through levels as a way of falling down the rabbit hole following a “spinal hinge” reaching a projected wonderland in a tiny, mirrored room at the bottom of the stairs. The tree house does not intrude upon its environment. It looks as if it grows from the forest rather than being placed on it. There’s a relationship among all involved: trees, birds, animals, the work, the people, all connected in these interwoven processes of life.
The tree house is a magnetic force attracting the energies needed in the studio. Each space takes a symbiotic role in the creative cycle: places to study, read, rest, gather ideas, stretch the mind, ease the mind, stretch the body, ease the body, places to gather. We like to change the level or the room in which we work or gather to perform, discuss, think and engage within the different vitalities of each space.
artXarchitectureXstudio creates various forms of art, ranging from architectural installations to three-dimensional assemblages — sculptural reliefs — to handmade and digitally printed books. Assemblage, in our definition, refers not only to matter but to concepts and ideas. Painting and drawing are also common in the studio; we use sketches, drawings and digital prints as a part of our communication with each other and as a way to develop ideas.
We are drawn to natural materials, wood, branches, leaves, vines, moss, tree bark, rocks, bones, shells, and found objects from the forest. Beveled glass, broken glass, metal, and treasured items that have been collected throughout time may be incorporated. We access a wide variety of media for our works and enjoy experimenting with manipulation, such as burning Tyvek or oxidizing metals. Our materials — collected through the years and selected from collections of the past; found fragments of nature and fragments of art — might work their way into an “emerging assemblage.”
Energy is reciprocal and we feel our work emerges from the energy of this place and time generating energy back into it. The materialization of our ideas and concepts happens in the studio on the lower level which extends to an outdoor work area. Both look like that swamp we mentioned earlier.
My story is a tale of becoming, being and disappearing. I am now in the third stage — disappearing. In teaching architecture studios at Iowa State and Auburn University, I found that I enjoyed having younger people around and sometimes could see them taking my critiques and carrying through my concepts further than I could. It made me want to have a studio that worked like an architect’s studio, one where the architect does the design and artists are around to help with the carry-through. My work over the past 20 years has operated in this manner.
After studying and teaching in Europe and the U.S., I returned to Anniston, Alabama, asking myself, “Why am I here?” I remembered Picasso’s words: “[The artist] can only rediscover what has been lost, forgotten and misunderstood.”
Alabama is certainly such a place in need of rediscovery. Working in collaboration is both an opportunity and a challenge. There are many differences in one’s being and our way of understanding each other. Coming together from a different place and time increases the vibrational energy within the work dynamic and encourages a different method of creating. This method can especially champion elder artists to continue their work.
Jesse W. Akers has worked with me since 2018. A 55-year age difference exists between us.
Jesse: I didn’t start as a collaborator. I had artistic inclinations and practiced often, but I still had much to learn and always will. It was absorbing Pat’s practice and principles, what influenced her ideas and connecting these processes or methodologies, that would prepare me to evolve and assemble our concepts. Coming from a surrealist background, I had to lean my mind into an idea of abstraction or what Pat considers a “visual philosophy,” a place my mind didn’t so willingly go.
Even in two dimensions, we see a direction into a depth that bridges the viewer to a motion or path revealing these greater patterns.
When I joined the artXarchitecture team, there were processes of becoming, being and disappearing happening in the development of our shared endeavors — myself in a new environment, new challenges, new difficulties, a cycle of growing and decreasing, knowledge and doubt, a shift in roles — where I would take on a more direct approach and see my collaborator adjust to a different way of working. Work that brought a new way of constructing ideas.
Pat: Our studio operates on many architectural principles and uses a method of layering to create concepts. We document and archive as a way to preserve layers and come back to them as points of expansion. In essence, our studio is a place for serious PLAY, EXPERIMENT, not knowing what the outcome will be. It is truly the space of the question.
Most walk in and see a world of total madness where we see a place to make the impossible, possible. There is a liberation in creating; play or experimenting is a part of that freedom. Even our animals, my cat, Merlin, and Jesse’s retired racing greyhound, Salvador, engage in our play and creative energies in the studio.
However, it is not all play, much of our work requires a degree of engineering and problem-solving, something more technical, more analytical. At any given moment, there are many cogs turning and being a part of the team requires you to “wear many hats.”
I love Deleuze because he tries very hard not to tell you what to do or think and that is collaboration at its best. It is important in our work that we don’t tell you how to think or see, but present possibilities.
I consider myself a translator — a map maker. I read many books at one time and translate what I read into images. Images are another language, one more collectively understood by the whole.
The space between the map and the territory continues to appeal to me in that the imagination must travel beyond the surface to connect the two. Our work often becomes something of a three- dimensional map and might be seen as an architectural model.
Observing and translating into the language of art is not looking at a surface, but into a multi-dimensional abyss of ripples, reflections and repetitions, something that emerges into the landscape of our world.
Although the future will give us imaginary portals into many virtual realities, we want our work to be grounded by a SITE in the real world. That is what our tree house studio, here in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, is for us and for anyone who would like to come for a visit.
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Pat: From the beginning, my work has been about exploring the space between. From 1995 to 1997, I studied in London, Paris and Helsinki and received my Master of European Studies in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Design in Helsinki.
My thesis project, “Skinning the CATTt,” looks into the space between and concludes, “In the end, all we have are the moments, the details. We watch as they are absorbed by the paper, as they slide between blank pages. The details are more than a magnified view — more than fragments of the whole. They are the lines, the tales, that open to all boundaries at once.”
Reading Douglas Hofstadter and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gives me another way to look between. The difference between Hofstadter and Deleuze is: Hofstadter sees likeness while Deleuze sees difference. I attempt to see both while visualizing the unseen.
I was first fascinated by Bell’s theorem in the early 1970s, now called quantum entanglement. It still is at the top of my interests — how we are all connected, not only in the moment but throughout time. What is time that it allows such an interconnectedness?
My work since 2005 has been about mapping patterns. When beginning my work with PATTERNS I asked my grandson Morgan, age 3, what he thought a pattern was. He thought for a few minutes and said, “Things that go on and on.”
It is the movement and evolution of these patterns that interests me. Looking back at my own evolution, reaching out and returning, I see the movement of the Möbius twisting and turning.
I am now looking for connections: the movement between, patterns of place and patterns in time — between my last two bodies of work Patterns of Place: Isomorphic Map Tables and Patterns in Time: becoming… being.. disappearing. I see the tree house itself as an installation of becoming, being and disappearing. Visiting our virtual tree house studio is to explore a space between art and architecture grounded by a site.
It also may be like exploring a swamp: “A place of mystery, of enchantment, of danger, where liquid sounds hang in the mist. The swamp is not like a mountain range or a sunset that might be loved from a distance. You must be in the midst of the swamp — sense its dangers — to know the enchantment of its presence. The swamp is a place for passive activities — watching, listening — allowing something to be done to us. The swamp is a place of non-symmetrical reflections — where trees are indistinguishable from their roots — a place that is alive, aware — a place of origins, of contradictions, of coexisting processes that enliven each other.” — from Skinning the CATTt
The whole tree house acts as the studio in a similar way.
My family moved to Alabama from Charleston, South Carolina, when I was 5. My father, an architect and acrobat, encouraged fun, play and questioning. Part of my quest for fun included exploring. I would hike these magical hills and remember discovering a place with natural springs and waterfalls known as Booger Hollow. I still remember a moment when my heart leapt with joy.
At about 10 years old, I was walking a tiny path along the steep side of a flowing rocky mountain stream, light rippling on the water, shadows and spring breezes playing with the sparkling green leaves. I remember pronouncing it “my favorite place.”
Years later when I walked this property looking for a place to build, my heart knew right where it was. It is where I continue to play and create, falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
Photo by Peter Frank Edwards
One of the first things I learned to do was to fall. From the time I was a small babe, my father would hold me high in the air. I can still remember the fall, always to be caught by strong hands just before hitting the ground. I still remember the trust I felt in the fall.
The fall is another way to travel through the space between.
In 1975, in collaboration with architect Julian Jenkins, we designed and built the tree house, which contained my studio as well as the family home for my husband, Guice Potter, Jr., and two children, Guice III, who was age 12 at the time, and Julee, age 9.
The front entry to the tree house is across a 75-foot bridge at the third level. One may descend the three-story stairwell moving through levels as a way of falling down the rabbit hole following a “spinal hinge” reaching a projected wonderland in a tiny, mirrored room at the bottom of the stairs. The tree house does not intrude upon its environment. It looks as if it grows from the forest rather than being placed on it. There’s a relationship among all involved: trees, birds, animals, the work, the people, all connected in these interwoven processes of life.
The tree house is a magnetic force attracting the energies needed in the studio. Each space takes a symbiotic role in the creative cycle: places to study, read, rest, gather ideas, stretch the mind, ease the mind, stretch the body, ease the body, places to gather. We like to change the level or the room in which we work or gather to perform, discuss, think and engage within the different vitalities of each space.
artXarchitectureXstudio creates various forms of art, ranging from architectural installations to three-dimensional assemblages — sculptural reliefs — to handmade and digitally printed books. Assemblage, in our definition, refers not only to matter but to concepts and ideas. Painting and drawing are also common in the studio; we use sketches, drawings and digital prints as a part of our communication with each other and as a way to develop ideas.
We are drawn to natural materials, wood, branches, leaves, vines, moss, tree bark, rocks, bones, shells, and found objects from the forest. Beveled glass, broken glass, metal, and treasured items that have been collected throughout time may be incorporated. We access a wide variety of media for our works and enjoy experimenting with manipulation, such as burning Tyvek or oxidizing metals. Our materials — collected through the years and selected from collections of the past; found fragments of nature and fragments of art — might work their way into an “emerging assemblage.”
Energy is reciprocal and we feel our work emerges from the energy of this place and time generating energy back into it. The materialization of our ideas and concepts happens in the studio on the lower level which extends to an outdoor work area. Both look like that swamp we mentioned earlier.
My story is a tale of becoming, being and disappearing. I am now in the third stage — disappearing. In teaching architecture studios at Iowa State and Auburn University, I found that I enjoyed having younger people around and sometimes could see them taking my critiques and carrying through my concepts further than I could. It made me want to have a studio that worked like an architect’s studio, one where the architect does the design and artists are around to help with the carry-through. My work over the past 20 years has operated in this manner.
After studying and teaching in Europe and the U.S., I returned to Anniston, Alabama, asking myself, “Why am I here?” I remembered Picasso’s words: “[The artist] can only rediscover what has been lost, forgotten and misunderstood.”
Alabama is certainly such a place in need of rediscovery. Working in collaboration is both an opportunity and a challenge. There are many differences in one’s being and our way of understanding each other. Coming together from a different place and time increases the vibrational energy within the work dynamic and encourages a different method of creating. This method can especially champion elder artists to continue their work.
Jesse W. Akers has worked with me since 2018. A 55-year age difference exists between us.
Jesse: I didn’t start as a collaborator. I had artistic inclinations and practiced often, but I still had much to learn and always will. It was absorbing Pat’s practice and principles, what influenced her ideas and connecting these processes or methodologies, that would prepare me to evolve and assemble our concepts. Coming from a surrealist background, I had to lean my mind into an idea of abstraction or what Pat considers a “visual philosophy,” a place my mind didn’t so willingly go.
Even in two dimensions, we see a direction into a depth that bridges the viewer to a motion or path revealing these greater patterns.
When I joined the artXarchitecture team, there were processes of becoming, being and disappearing happening in the development of our shared endeavors — myself in a new environment, new challenges, new difficulties, a cycle of growing and decreasing, knowledge and doubt, a shift in roles — where I would take on a more direct approach and see my collaborator adjust to a different way of working. Work that brought a new way of constructing ideas.
Pat: Our studio operates on many architectural principles and uses a method of layering to create concepts. We document and archive as a way to preserve layers and come back to them as points of expansion. In essence, our studio is a place for serious PLAY, EXPERIMENT, not knowing what the outcome will be. It is truly the space of the question.
Most walk in and see a world of total madness where we see a place to make the impossible, possible. There is a liberation in creating; play or experimenting is a part of that freedom. Even our animals, my cat, Merlin, and Jesse’s retired racing greyhound, Salvador, engage in our play and creative energies in the studio.
However, it is not all play, much of our work requires a degree of engineering and problem-solving, something more technical, more analytical. At any given moment, there are many cogs turning and being a part of the team requires you to “wear many hats.”
I love Deleuze because he tries very hard not to tell you what to do or think and that is collaboration at its best. It is important in our work that we don’t tell you how to think or see, but present possibilities.
I consider myself a translator — a map maker. I read many books at one time and translate what I read into images. Images are another language, one more collectively understood by the whole.
The space between the map and the territory continues to appeal to me in that the imagination must travel beyond the surface to connect the two. Our work often becomes something of a three- dimensional map and might be seen as an architectural model.
Observing and translating into the language of art is not looking at a surface, but into a multi-dimensional abyss of ripples, reflections and repetitions, something that emerges into the landscape of our world.
Although the future will give us imaginary portals into many virtual realities, we want our work to be grounded by a SITE in the real world. That is what our tree house studio, here in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, is for us and for anyone who would like to come for a visit.
The Women Create Foundation is a catalyst for small but significant strides to empower women creators through grants that help bring projects to life and foster innovation.
