Where We Stood
Exhibition: june 10 - July 5
Words can trigger a response in the artist which translates emotionally in their work. Conversely visual art can elicit in the poet a non-literal verbal response. It is this back-and-forth which Neale and Kenyon are exploring in this new work. Not a collaboration, but a conversation: about their journeys through beauty and tragedy, love and rejection, meaning and emptiness.
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Where We Stood
by
Jude Neale:
They gathered and sang one song
then left it in the corners
and beside the chairs,
on the tables and under eiderdowns,
on the window ledges,
and in each other.
How could they have known
the secrets that live
in that space behind the knees?
That arms as they rise make bones fly,
and scars are made of someone
else’s stories and are seldom
the one’s you see?
That you can kiss the cleft of a baby,
just to be the first.
And oh
the skin they touched.
Bathed skin, brown skin, bruised skin,
palms and fingers and painted toes.
They heard the questions and asked their own.
Listened to the whispered fears
of a blue boy with stones for lungs.
A girl in yellow boots clutched
the hand of a seven year old boy
learning the music of thin reeds
and his own simple future.
They tasted the exotic in Zanzibar,
travelled home to Ithaca
to find out who they were.
Walked with hooded priests
through forests lighting the sky on fire,
over ice flows, over oceans,
over high deserts and fragrant prairies.
To back allies, to sacred places,
to their forgotten lives
and to the ones they held onto.
There were seven part poems,
twelve line poems, ones that had never reached so far.
Story poems, first poems,
stuck poems and some that teased
them and stole their sleep.
They looked closely from great distances
at cowboys and those who sleep in dumpsters,
piano players with upside down music,
and a woman with arms strong
enough to stir the pot that held them all.
They chased black dogs
and blonde ones, followed grasshoppers,
whales, hummingbirds.
Stood in quiet communion
with that four-point Buck,
grace on a Sunday morning.
They left meaning behind and searched
only for the sound.Sang their words,
found their rhythm, opened to the spirit
that lives in all poems.
A scarlet butterfly rose and lulled them
to their rest with the notes
of the one great song.
Then they all abandoned
themselves to that final
sweet surprise.
Jane Kenyon
Fibre Artist
Artist Statement:
My artwork is composed of many layers of paint, torn fragments of previous work and stitch.
We live in a time of impermanence – of ideas, objects, families, technology, careers. As I
explore the anxiety of these rapid changes, I am learning to enjoy the transience of any
individual artwork: yielding to the freedom of the transformations taking place on the surface,
and perhaps in me as well. Recent work with recycled domestic textiles feels like a further
exploration of the permanence/impermanence of materials, perhaps an attempt to salvage
their usefulness.
In a friendship spanning almost 30 years, Jude Neale and I have discussed poetry and painting,
motherhood and family, illness and pain, love and life. Over the years we have yearned for
artistic collaboration, knowing intuitively that Jude’s poetry and my visual art were deeply
connected. During this past year, Jude’s poem Where We Stood, provided the impetus and my
new textile work on recycled t-shirts and other domestic cloth delivered the perfect fit. This
exhibition is about our journey, those hundreds of conversations that have taken place over the
years between two women, mothers, poet and artist.
READ MORE HERE
Artists in Our Midst: Artist Talk with Jane Kenyon Coming Soon