Arizona Illustrated 1214: Backyard Gardening & Strawbale building

This week on Arizona Illustrated we’ll show you how Angela Judd turned her suburban backyard into a bountiful garden and grew an impressive YouTube following along the way; plus, we’ll show you the community resources from the University of Arizona she used to get started and how to can learn from them too; take a trip to the Canelo Project in Sonoita, Arizona and meet a family that has helped popularize strawbale building techniques, and Curt Brill’s distinctive sculptures are larger than life.

Backyard Bounty
Mesa, AZ resident Angela Judd’s life has never been the same since she took a master gardening class from the University of Arizona’s Cooperative Extension program. By learning about soils, best watering practices, the right time to plant, and other recommendations, she has transformed her backyard and her life.

The Canelo Project – A Strawbale Story
The Canelo Project, a family ranch in Sonoita, Arizona, redefines homebuilding using the most basic of resources, dirt and straw. Bill and Athena Steen, the husband-and-wife team that founded the project, use strawbales as the building blocks for the foundation of their homes. They stitch together the bales and plaster them with a clay mixture that they create themselves. This process creates a highly insulated, customizable home. They have written books on their practice and hold workshops to teach this method to others from around the world.

Curt Brill - Larger Than Life
Curt Brill is a Tucson based internationally known sculptor. Drawing has always been his first and most enduring love—a quiet, intimate practice that continues to ground his artistic journey. Yet, it is his three-dimensional work that has brought him the most recognition. Since the mid-1970s, his ceramic Tea Bowls have been widely collected across the United States, celebrated for their quiet strength and meditative presence. In 1980, he began working in bronze, marking a pivotal turn in his career and deepening his relationship with material and form.

His sculptures are not simply objects, but sensual, intuitive responses to the materials he engages with—clay, plaster, wax, metal. Each piece begins as a tactile exploration, evolving into a deeply personal expression of what he calls the “hidden human spirit”—that elusive, vital spark that makes each of us singular, and yet profoundly connected.

Movement, dance, and an irrepressible sense of humor animate much of his work. His whimsical, often larger-than-life sculptures pulse with life and rhythm, echoing the joy and vulnerability of being human. “In my pieces,” he says, “I first search for a bit of movement, then I search for the humor to help carry me through the piece, and in completion I search for serenity.”

This layered emotional resonance—playful, searching, grounded—has earned his work widespread appeal among collectors across the United States, Europe, and Japan. Through his hands, material becomes metaphor, and sculpture becomes a quiet act of connection—between artist and viewer, body and spirit, the individual and the universal.