WHAT WE DO

At its core, GROUNDWORK’s mission is to use process-oriented creative direction to help individuals, institutions, and companies animate process and cultivate potential.

Created by Rita Leduc in 2013, GROUNDWORK began with an emphasis on interdisciplinary (or undisciplinary) research retreats. Most commonly today, GROUNDWORK shows up through consulting and specialty experiences (workshops, courses, talks). No matter the iteration, GROUNDWORK works with individuals or groups who have a developing inquiry, project, or circumstance.

With careful consideration of context and ambition, GROUNDWORK trades forward thinking for present focus, troubleshooting for unstructured play, and limitations for empowerment. We create the space of practical dreaming that is essential for development. Be it a consultation, experience, or retreat, GROUNDWORK’s process-oriented creative direction achieves a holistic yet intimate understanding of any kind of project-in-process, clarifying and activating new pathways and potential.

PRINCIPLES OF ENGAGEMENT

No matter the manifestation, GROUNDWORK utilizes four foundational principles of engagement: presence, process, intuition, and relationality.

• Presence: The nature of being a living thing is that we’re constantly in motion. Rather than being consumed by this motion, GROUNDWORK partners with it. By opening a space of dexterity, communication, and experimentation, GROUNDWORK presences the fluidity of the moment.

• Process: In a healthy environment, ideas adapt in response to the process. When the process is strong and ideas are adaptive, ideas become strong and success more likely. Through experience-based, playful collaboration, GROUNDWORK favors process to uncover more fertile and resilient ideas.

• Intuition: Intuition is a frequently underdeveloped primal gift. By inviting nascent ideas and welcoming presence and process, GROUNDWORK empowers intuitions and endorses gut instincts.

• Relationality: Whether a curated interdisciplinary cohort, a team of colleagues with a diversity of backgrounds, or an individual client, GROUNDWORK prioritizes idiosyncrasy, intimacy, and interconnection. By creating and/or discovering this robust ecosystem, ideas are able to take root and thrive.

GROUNDWORK’S BACKSTORY

In Summer 2013, after waiting my entire life, I visited the redwood forests of northern California. I told myself to lower my expectations; they had soared way too high over the years. But despite my best efforts, my expectations were exceeded. Flying back to Brooklyn full of ferns and fairytales, the concept of GROUNDWORK was born.

It came from a few questions. These included wondering why, at a certain life stage, we stop interacting with people outside of our own field. At about that same stage, we are also expected to fail significantly less frequently. We seem to be either community-minded or self-interested – quite the jump – and we are always, always expected to be moving toward an expertly-articulated, predetermined goal.

As I approached said life stage, this shift didn’t sit right. It was not how I operated in my process-and-place-based creative practice, and it did not follow the value system I held in my similarly nature-grounded life. And, despite the challenges this presented to me when attempting to function within systems that did accept (or worse, direct) this shift, the practices and values I embraced were feeding me.

This was not an unfamiliar incongruity; I knew it well from watching my parents reject such shifts. So I followed their lead. I doubled down on my own creative practice and life-living. And then I went a step further. I wondered: how can I offer this reprieve to others? How can I mimic the fundamentals of my own creative life, where wisdom and direction is reliably revealed to me through playful, intuitive engagement with the world? Where process leads, potential is always in waiting, and boundaries are permeable? Where inspiration is synonymous with failure, and we maintain an intimate, secure-because-we’re-vulnerable connection with the world?

In 2014, Patricia Brace came to my rescue. Artist, friend, inspiration, and instigator, she called me out on my process-orientation: “Why don’t we just do it?” She was right, and so we ran our first GROUNDWORK retreat.

It was MAGIC. I will not take the space here to explain to you how utterly soul-filling and soul-expanding it was. GROUNDWORK was here.

After a few rounds, chef Clara DeAngelo stepped up to the plate (kitchen pun). What a relief it was to not cook and facilitate at the same time! But even more so, what a gift it was to be so expertly nourished physically while nourishing ourselves creatively and intellectually.

In 2019, Patricia moved back to her home state of Maine, making it hard for her to continue a solid presence with GROUNDWORK. Almost simultaneously, I met Chris Bodwitch through our common employer, Rutgers University. I could not believe my luck; Chris’ energy and expertise deepened the GROUNDWORK experience individually and collectively. She was on board immediately, and we were planning our next retreat imminently. It commenced on March 6, 2020 and it was majestic.

You all know this part. The world stopped and we did not run another retreat for two years.

Now, after a two-year dormancy where we focused on our own groundwork, we are back, forever in process, cultivating our own potential. In an effort to expand GROUNDWORK’s reach, we have expanded our focus into consulting, workshops, courses, and talks. As GROUNDWORK continues to grow in response to its ecosystem, we are our own clients, participating as a means of uncovering potential. It is an endless adventure and we are enjoying the ride!

— Rita Leduc, 2023