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"She doesn’t control her writing decisions." Bilingual Issue - Natalia Carrero

6/9/2024

Tana Oshima introduced me to Natalia Carrero, a writer and artist living in Madrid, Spain. Her writing themes are about maladjustments, addictions, and mental illnesses using images and words in Spanish. She occasionally writes in English. Her books are available internationally from Amazon.

I am excited to share Carrero's work because this is the first bilingual issue of Working On Gallery!

Carrero wrote two short essays:

"Babbling pages" in English
"Consulta" in Spanish

These essays are juxtaposed about controal.

"Babbling pages" is about a writing process - - let it be - - embrace spontaneity and do not follow rules or previous methods.

On the other hand, "Consulta" is about eczema. The narrative tries to control her condition first. I have never seen an accurate drawing and writing of this condition. Random letters rise up from the skin's surface. It looks very irritating. I truly know that itchy feeling. I am an eczema patient from birth.

Therefore, I thought that it may be a good idea to translate "Consulta" from Spanish to English. I took Spanish classes for two semesters at my Japanese college twenty years ago, and I took Italian classes last year for my trip. It is obvious that my Spanish is an early beginner's level, but I thought that it may be a good experiment to use both Google Translate and my creative writing experience.

If you are a translator and also translate Carrero's "Consulta" into English, let me know. I am happy to share your version on Working on Gallery and my Instagram account.

Instagram @lalectoracomun

Natalia Carrero, Barcelona 1970. I doodle and draw, think fast and think slow. In my books, I combine both speeds to narrate maladjustments, addictions and mental illnesses. A novel: I'm a box, translated by Johanna Warren. A comic: Letra rebelde. Last fanzine: Gran ofertón.

Spanish Version, I'm a box
English Version, I'm a box

Instagram @lalectoracomun

Babbling pages:
Essay in English by Natalia Carrero

A suspicion: she is not just she but a sum of voices and experiences, and also the tree and the street and all things and news around. She does not have the control of her words but she tries to understand why we are becoming more and more individualists. She wishes to comunicate anything more than a message. The algorithm of our lives always intervienes, the imperatives of consum this and that just now, and that over-sugared stuff too. She doesn’t control her writing decisions.

Natalia Carrero

Sometimes she purposely went out of control. She releases the rules, the learnings. Her best texts are. Not are. Never the best. Her handcrafted productions. Her asemic else. Unreadable. Something uncomfortable. When she thinks she is realy loosing her comunication ability or she feels too tired to believe in bubbling and bubbling, she tries to draw. Literatura del balbuceo. Paper and ink, just it, do it, move on. Black and withe, simplicity. Not exactly, constant search. She also mentally scribble while she walks or she takes the bus. Life could be devoid of objectives, goals, targets, be a present space of undefined movements. improvisations with effects and defects, discoveries, and all the doubts and hesitations should become more prominent. Babbling again, come here.

Natalia Carrero

Without knowing why, or to activate the latent power of all the useless gestures, last february she made a fanzine, direct literature from face to face, smile to smile, sonrisa, páginas repletas de balbuceos registrados casi para nada. Fotocopiados en papel reciclado, encantados de recibir cualquier día el olvido que las memoria les reserve. Sixty pages full of babbling registered almost for nothing. Photocopied on recycled paper, delighted to receive any day the oblivion that memory reserves for them.

Consulta:
Essay in Spanish by Natalia Carrero

Pregunta la doctora si es autónoma para darle la baja hasta que se le pase el curioso eczema alfabético. Resulta tan insólito que ha hecho fotos con el móvil, para su análisis posterior junto a colegas especialistas dermatología.
Bueno, es autónoma en cierto modo, claro, cada mañana se viste y asea, y más cosas, sin ayuda. A efectos económicos sin embargo es dependiente, como algunas vecinas, del hombre blanco encorbatado que al final del día exige halagos, un esquema del siglo pasado. Con todo lo que ha trabajado, y el cansancio patente que le supura la piel, cómo pica, cuánto durará, ¿acaso ese mensaje que lanza el eczema no está diciendo algo? Pues resulta que la jornada aún debe alargarse más en formato juerga carnal unilateralmente solicitada. ¿Y si insiste para que la doctora lea de una vez lo que pone?
¿Qué le voy a decir, doctora, soy o no soy autónoma? Dejémoslo, no me dé la baja ni la pomada, si por la tarde encuentro el momento ya me leo yo el eczema y me autoprescribo lo primero que alcance. Con un poco de suerte todo esto también pasará.

Consultation:
Translated by Naoko Fujimoto

The doctor asks if this girl can take a sick day off until unknown, alphabetic words disappear on her skin. It is so unusual that the doctor took photos with their cellphone to share with his fellow dermatologists in later analysis.
Well, in a way she takes control, of course, every morning she dresses and washes herself, and deals with more daily complications without anybody’s help. She relies on her expenses as other neighbors do. The white man wearing a tie only receives praise at the end of the day, this economic system has been dominant for the last century. Despite her effort, her skin oozes out. It will last forever; how irritating it is. What does this want to tell? Well, it takes her eternal future like a unilaterally requested carnal spree. Doctor, what are the words written on her skin? Can she control them or not? Don't give the sick leave or the ointment. Let's leave it as is, so she will find the time to explore eczema. She will prescribe the first thing she can this afternoon. With a little luck, all of her conflicts will pass too.

You may be interested in purchasing...

Five Euro, Chapbook on Sale

Primera página First page fanzine babbling literature.
60 páginas, tercera versión en abril 2024
If you would like to purchase this chapbook, please contact: Natalia Carrero

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"The broadsides invite the type of curious interaction that I want for my poems; rather than presenting a legible text alongside a complementary image, they present a poem that is also itself a visual experience." - Genevieve Kaplan

5/12/2024

Toad Press leaped into my mind when I started entering translation communities. During the pandemic, I had the chance to read translation submissions from several magazines.

"I love this translator!"

I googled the person, and my online search ended with Toad Press several times. It was a strange feeling because this publisher seemed like to create handmade, small collections. However, their list of translators is really phenomenal.

I submitted my first translation collection and received a rejection with a kind note. For the following year, I also learned that Genevieve Kaplan (editor & publisher) is a friend of my poet sister Angela Narciso Torres. I introduced myself to Kaplan at AWP Kansas City and we exchanged friendship bracelets.

The Toad Press chapbooks were truly beautifully, carefully crafted - - this is really made by a passion and love of books -- and I learned that she also practices experimental poetry writing.

"Some consider the “best” or final version of the poem as the words printed (preferably on a bound page), or the performance of the poem (usually in front of an audience). This rings true for me, too, but I also like to think about how poems can invite interaction in visual or tactile manners. In presenting poems through less expected formats, I also want to consider accessibility, editionality, uniqueness, and allure." - - Genevieve Kaplan

I love how Kaplan approaches poetry. This definitely relates to my graphic poetry theme, "Trans. Sensory". In addition, I am so excited to have my first translation chapbook with Toad Press. Their new chapbook collections will be available at the end of this year.

Genevieve Kaplan

Pictured: “a symmetry” broadsides, 2024. Series of 7, Each 8x10.” Cardstock, paper, ink. Genevieve Kaplan

This series of woven paper broadsides is the latest iteration of my explorations into expanding possibilities for poems and thinking about how I want a poem to be experienced.

Some consider the “best” or final version of the poem as the words printed (preferably on a bound page), or the performance of the poem (usually in front of an audience). This rings true for me, too, but I also like to think about how poems can invite interaction in visual or tactile manners. In presenting poems through less expected formats, I also want to consider accessibility, editionality, uniqueness, and allure. I’m pleased with this new series of broadsides, and I’m also interested in how I can trace the lineage of this series in some of my previous projects.

I started moving some of my poems off the page and into other spaces a few years ago. I wanted to think about how else a reader might encounter a poem. And during the encounter, could a reader/viewer be invited not only to read but also to perhaps to physically interact, to move their body to follow the lines of poem?

For example, in the flag poems pictured here, I sewed lines of a poem onto landscape flag markers and “planted” them among the poppies in my front yard. They’re small—the flags are about 4 x 5”, and they aren’t rigid, so I knew if someone wanted to read one, they’d need to bend down, get up close, and maybe touch the flag to straighten the letters. To read another flag, they’d need to move further into the poppy field.

Pictured: “Holding the sugar higher,” (detail). 2019. Textual installation: poppies, flag markers, thread. Genevieve Kaplan

At the same time, I was working on a series of sewn and woven broadsides. I think of the broadside as a fairly traditional form, as it’s one we literary types encounter often enough, at bookstores, readings, colleges, and publication events. Most often literary broadsides are printed (letterpress or even laserjet) and present a single poem accompanied by an illustration.

Poetry broadsides isolate and elevate a poem: once printed in broadside form, the poem becomes not only a poem to read but also a piece of art to admire. I have several poetry broadsides in my home, and because these poems are hung on the wall I find that I read them both more often than and differently from the poems contained in the books on my shelves.

Pictured: “The Fatalist,” broadside, 2003. Edition of 75. Letterpress. Poem by Lyn Hejinian; artwork based on John Dilg’s “Power Line Aesthetic.” Genevieve Kaplan

For creating broadsides of my own work, I knew I didn’t have ready access to a letterpress or a large format printer; nor did I have a lot of patience to learn new technology. But I did have a loom and some spare yarn, so I decided to sew and weave a poem into a broadside.

Pictured: “Shift up and down the wires (that close them in),” woven broadside. 2020. Yarn, ribbon. 18 x 24” framed. Genevieve Kaplan

I created a total of three woven broadsides, each of a different poem. Then I framed the broadsides in shadowboxes and tucked them into my closet. I love the broadsides’ tactility, and their unique nature. In their woven form my poems behave differently: there are wonky letters, tufts of wool, and evidence of many imperfections for a reader to contend with. Reading the woven lines makes you—well, me, anyway—want to touch them.

I enjoyed the process of making them, too: I liked the idea of making a poem material—literally, making the poetic line a physical line, by embroidering letters, words, and phrases on a thin ribbon. And then later, when I wove the ribbons/lines together, those embroidered lines combined with yarn, with other discrete threads, to create a larger piece of material—in this case a poem composed of physically connected lines.

These woven broadsides achieve what I intended—they offer a singular and active experience for a reader, and they underscore the labor behind the words. But these broadsides are also bulky and heavy (as framed), and, because of the time and materials that went into creating them, they’re cost prohibitive. No one really gets to see them. They don’t tap into the type of accessibility that a broadside printed in an edition of 50 or 100 might have. These material broadsides are not fancy posters one could frame or even pin on the wall. Instead, my woven broadsides are un-replicatable, unique poem-art objects. Is the best, most final version of my poem “Shift up and down the wires…,” the one tucked into my closet? I’m not sure.

So I started thinking about how else to create handmade broadsides. In addition to having a lot of yarn, I also had a lot of paper, and I thought I could use the paper to create a more accessible visual and maybe tactile experience.

Pictured: “a symmetry” (detail), 2024. Paper, ink. Genevieve Kaplan

For this next project I cut strips of paper, handwrote lines of my poem “a symmetry” onto them, and then wove into them with vertical strips of decorative paper. The text of my poem responds to my neighbor’s tree, which grows over our shared fence, drops leaves and twigs and fruits, and is always in need of trimming. When adhering the woven poem to the cardstock, I glued the weave at its junctures, and the warp—the vertical lines, the trunk of the tree—to the paper only, allowing the lines of the poem a little freedom and movement as they extend. I was excited about giving the lines of the poem (the weft of my weave) the same kind of unkept reach as the tree.

I intended to create multiple “a symmetry” broadsides so the project would resemble a printed edition, a more mass-produced series. But as I was writing and weaving and gluing, I became interested in exploring variations: considering different angles and spacing for my lines, incorporating stanza breaks into the poem, and embracing variations in the printed paper warp I’d selected. The seven broadsides in the series each present the same poem, the same language, and the same paper, but each does so just a little bit differently.

This woven paper broadside project achieves the kind of invitation and accessibility I’ve been after for a while now. The broadsides invite the type of curious interaction that I want for my poems; rather than presenting a legible text alongside a complementary image, they present a poem that is also itself a visual experience. The words of my poem aren’t completely clear because of the weave; some language is obscured by the warp, which means readers may skip over words or try to fill in the blanks, or just decide to engage with the words visually instead of logically. The handwritten text adds another level of visual interest and potential illegibility.

I also like how the materials are simple and inexpensive. Cutting and weaving paper text in straight lines was tactile, meditative, and enjoyable but not overly time consuming. The 8 x 10” size of the finished broadsides means they’re easy to transport and simple to frame. The broadsides are flat, or can be flattened, making them essentially a two-dimensional page.

And, importantly, these broadsides are a little less ephemeral. They weren’t planted briefly with my poppies, they don’t exist mainly in my experience creating them, and they aren’t only hidden in my closet. I’ve sold a few—at art fairs, on Etsy—so they’re already popping up on walls and finding new readers/viewers.

Pictured: Framed broadside of “a symmetry” hanging in a librarian’s office, 2024. Genevieve Kaplan

For me, these broadsides reside in a sort of charming middle ground of the concerns I’ve been exploring in recent years. They succeed in evoking editionality, accessibility, uniqueness, and visual appeal. And, they invite readers to interact with the poem.

Is this series the “best” version of my poem “a symmetry”? I think so. The poem also lives on the page as a text only version, but it feels a little lonely there. I find my experience looking at and reading one of my “a symmetry” broadsides to be more complete: here, the poem has tangible depth, it challenges, it evokes, and it prioritizes the experience of reading or thinking about the work over the work—the poem—itself.

Instagram @vievekaplan

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020); In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation‘s poetry publication prize; and five chapbooks: Felines, which sounds like feelings (above/ground, 2022), I exit the hallway and turn right (above/ground, 2020), In an aviary (Grey Book, 2016), travelogue (Dancing Girl, 2016), and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013). Her poems can be found in Third Coast, Puerto del Sol, Denver Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Poetry, and other journals.

A poet, scholar, and book-maker, Genevieve earned her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She co-edited Et Al.: New Voices in Arts Management (IOPN, 2022), an open-access collection of ideas, action, and inspiration from contemporary arts managers. Since 2003, she’s been editing the Toad Press International chapbook series, which became an imprint of Veliz Books in 2021, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose. Genevieve lives in southern California.

Toad Press New Translation Chapbooks

Toad Press

Support Working on Gallery

$25.00

Your $25 donation will be a tremendous support for Working on Gallery's future guests and running costs.

If you become a patron, your name will appear in the next Working on Gallery's article. In addition, you will receive my first poetry book, "Where I Was Born", for U.S. shipments. Or, you will receive a thank-you letter for international shipments.

Working on Gallery has been used by universities, advanced-level art lectures, and writing workshops. Your donation will help this gallery be more successful.

Thank you so much - Naoko Fujimoto

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Happy National Poetry Month!

4/14/2024

I have been traveling, so I do not have a guest for this month. However, I was pretty excited to adventitiously pass the Masaoka Shiki Memorial Baseball Field in Tokyo. I shared some of my traveling stories on Instagram.

Recent Highlights:

Interview with Rosanna Young Oh, the author of The Corrected Version (Diode Edition, 2023)
Interview with Jen Karetnick, the author of Inheritance with a High Error Rate (Cider Press Review, 2024)
Interview with Patrick Donnelly, the author of Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025)
RHINO Reviews’ inaugural TRANSLATION ISSUE!

Working On Gallery Previous Guests

To read the full essay, click on the picture.

"I leave my body and enter the world created in language." - Maggie Queeney

3/10/2024

I got to know Maggie Queeney through the Poetry Foundation because I was one of their visiting artists in 2023. She facilitated and organized online workshops and events. Her learning prompts are available at the Poetry Foundation's website. They are great tools to use for classroom and individual settings.

LEARNING PROMPT

It is incredible to host free lectures for people from all over the world so they can learn about poetry. I also met students from India and Great Britain. Queeney has contributed significantly in building our global art community. It is a safe and welcoming environment for everyone who wants to learn.

I finally met her at the 2024 AWP in Kansas City. She came to a panel for The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature with Kelcey Ervick, Nick Potter, and Lauren Haldeman.

After AWP, I was wondering why I was excited to talk about words and images. Where do I want to head with fellow writers who practice art? It is corny to imagine, but we are running toward a bright light, though it is so vague.

"I leave my body and enter the world created in language. The present the body exists within can be left behind." - - Maggie Queeney

We live until our existence fades, as it should (which is so simple); so does our creativity. But it often gets lost between the Yin and Yang. How can we block out the noises around us to enter a world governed by language? How can we merge with "the letters inside the words as mine."

Her book In Kind, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in 2023.

In 1990, when I was eight years old, beloved children’s author Beverly Cleary published Muggie Maggie, a book about another eight-year-old girl who refused to learn to write in cursive. I never resisted drawing the strange, ornate characters over and over during cursive practice.

I could compose each letter, but when asked to write whole words, then sentences, then paragraphs, I struggled to reproduce the loops and staffs, hoops and turns. When tasked with turning shapes into strands of meaning through the black and blue rules of the notebook page, my hand still tangles, trips, and scribbles the words illegible.

Instagram @little_queeney

In 1992, when I was ten years old, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Now, my health care providers type Chronic PTSD or Complex PTSD into the dedicated glowing square of screen. Neither diagnosis officially exists.

I have to work to write sentences another person can read and understand. I am told my handwriting is bad, poor, illegible. I am told that the purpose of writing, of text, is to communicate with another, and I am failing.

In my first eight years, I had only heard the word muggy used to describe the heavy, hot late summer. It was not a word for a girl with my name. I did not understand how the main problem in her life was learning a new way to write.

How, in my memory, her fear of cursive was really a fear of growing up. For her, childhood meant familiar, safe. I knew each word, could write each letter in my own cursive, but I did not understand Muggie Maggie (the character, the world in the book, the story). The book could not communicate to me, but I knew, even then, that I was the one who was failing.

www.maggiequeeney.com

Dr. Judith Herman, the first researcher and scholar to recognize and name my particular species of PTSD, begins her seminal book Trauma and Recovery by noting that trauma is, by its very nature, unspeakable.

When worried or agitated or scared, I tic. I clear my throat a dozen times a minute. A thousand times an hour. I tic in my sleep, depending on the dream. I want to know what it is like, to want to remain a child. To live without this invisible bite always digging. Dream interpretation would say there is something I need to say that I cannot or will not say. Dream interpretation would say that I am choking on what I cannot or will not tell.

Dr. Herman notes:

“Traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensation and images[;]” and “In their predominance of imagery and bodily sensation, and in their absence of a verbal narrative, traumatic memories resemble the memories of young children” (38).

shenandoah literary

As a child, folded into the cold school desk, I filled the margins of my notebooks in eyes, wolves, snakes. The breasts and necks and heads of women in profile. Their elaborate hairdos. Lightning and roots, tornadoes and disembodied hands. Birds, eggs, trees, and nests.

When do writing and drawing become different practices? How can I know, bent over the blank field of the page, whether I am drawing or writing? What decides: the body or the mind?

A defining symptom of my disorder in frequent, severe, and uncontrollable dissociation, a state where the body is separated from the mind. A disassociated child can barely register a blow to the head, so far away she is from her soft body. A state of dissociation can be induced by writing. I leave my body and enter the world created in language. The present the body exists within can be left behind.

Drawing, I am made to stay in the present. My mind slows to the speed of my hand and other materials: ink and paper, paint and pencil, blades and glue. When I draw each letter, I am made to consider each letter, each word, I write before I write. Made to mean what I mean. To consider what a wolf or root work or nest really looks like, and how to arrange each part into the whole of the page. I can stay inside a body engaged by the hand and the eye, recognize the letters inside the words as mine.

Maggie Queeney is the author of In Kind, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, forthcoming in 2023, and settler (Tupelo Press). She is recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, the Ruth Stone Scholarship, and two IAP Grants from the City of Chicago. Her poems, stories, and hybrid works have been published widely. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.

Working On Gallery Past Guest Editors:

Luisa A. Igloria

Meg Reynolds

Francesca Preston

“I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

Support Working on Gallery

more information

Your $25 donation will be a tremendous support for Working on Gallery's future guests and running costs.

If you become a patron, your name will appear in the next Working on Gallery's article. In addition, you will receive my first poetry book, "Where I Was Born", for U.S. shipments. Or, you will receive a thank-you letter for international shipments.

Working on Gallery has been used by universities, advanced-level art lectures, and writing workshops. Your donation will help this gallery be more successful. Thank you so much - Naoko Fujimoto

"The most recent additions to my series come from research into astronomy and narratives on how matter from space led to the formation of Earth."

2/11/2024

KATRINA BELLO - HAWAK/HOLD (KAI) VIDEO (TO BE PLAYED ON LOOP), DIMENSIONS VARIABLE 2019.

This is the seventh volume of the Working On Gallery Guest Editor Series. Luisa A. Igloria interviewed Katrina Bello, who is a visual artist from the Philippines. This interview transcends my memories, which is deeply associated with my theme, "Trans. Sensory".

First, I want you to click on the above two-hand video.

What connects with your insights?

When I was nineteen years old, I was in Mandaue City, Cebu to study a leprosy community and child education with nursing students from the University of San Carlos. There, my team from the Nanzan Junior College shared Japanese children's stories every day. One of them was a story by Awa Naoko (安房直子, 1943-1993) who was a well-known writer of fairy tales in Japan.

Her pieces, The Fox's Window and Other Stories, were translated by Toshiya Kamei. The University of New Orleans Press published the book, but I am not sure that the book is still available now. However, you may like reading While the beans are cooking (translated by Kamei) in Kyoto Journal.

The Fox's Window was a story about a man who walked into the deepest forest and met a fox that died the man's index finger and thumb indigo. When he made a window with his four fingers, he could see memories, including his lost mother. He lost this ability when he accidentally washed his hands when he returned home.

Katrina Bello's video brought me back to things I forgot - - Awa's fox story, Pilipino children who made finger-windows together with their small hands pulled me into the excitement of life.

"Hawak/Hold (Teresa) 2020, Hawak is an ongoing series of animation and sculpture that has a drawing series component." - Katrina Bello

*All photographs are from Katrina Bello's website.

Artist Interview
KATRINA BELLO

Introduction
by Luisa A. Igloria

Visual artist Katrina Bello works in Montclair, NJ and in the Philippines where she was born and raised. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in both the United States and the Philippines.

Bello has received fellowships and residencies at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art, ME; Art & History Museums - Maitland, FL; and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, WY. She was a 2021 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow for the October 2021 residency at Millay Arts. Katrina received a BFA from the Mason Gross School of The Arts at Rutgers University and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

"Begun in 2016, Rockscape is a drawing installation that is based on my memories of a landscape in the southern Philippines where I was born and raised. The installation can be scaled into different width and dimensions." - Katrina Bello

Rocks, trees, grasses, bark, and water are some of the images that form the vocabulary of her work. Katrina began drawing and painting as a very young child in Davao City where she was born and raised. When she was eleven, she began exploring charcoal as an art medium, using coconut shells and driftwood from black sand beaches near her home.

Of late, she has also been experimenting with video and installations “to bring into focus nature’s otherness and sameness with the human world.” Bello founded and directs North Willow, an artist-run attic space in Montclair, NJ. It is an artist-run attic space dedicated to the idea of skill-sharing between visual artists toward the production of work.

"Begun in 2016, Bato Bato Bato is a series of drawings and paintings that is based on my memories of a landscape in the southern Philippines where I was born and raised." - Katrina Bello

Coming across her work, I was instantly mesmerized by her large-scale rendition of natural images and landscapes, and her use of powdered charcoal and pastels (which I learned she applies with her hands onto wall-size surfaces). Smudged lines, intricate cross-hatching and detailing endow the surfaces of her drawings with texture and movement. The resulting works exude both simplicity and depth of scale, intimacy and complexity, as well as profound serenity and a rich wildness.

I asked Katrina seven questions, which I invited her to treat as starting points or touchstones to any way she would like to respond in relation to her work. I also encouraged her to feel free to be anecdotal, and to sound like herself instead of responding from a third person-ish perspective.

"Katrina Bello: Knowable Earth" Visual Arts Center of NJ

Interview by Luisa A. Igloria:

Can you describe your most recent projects and what sparked your interest regarding these?

Katrina Bello: My drawing and video works are all ongoing series that I began many years ago. The series are all visualizations of my reflections and several journeys to understand the interrelated subjects of land, landscape, our complex relationship with the natural world, memory, my family, and my experience of immigration. Because I’ve been working on these series for a long time, they’ve gone through changes as they get informed by events, ideas and encounters that come into my life as the years progress.

My interest in these subjects stems primarily from the desire to visualize, or even create, a landscape to make up for the one that I immigrated from when I came to the United States. Sometimes I also see my work as something of a cross between such recreation and an alternative proposition of a remembered landscape that no longer exists except in my memory of it.

The most recent additions to my series come from research into astronomy and narratives on how matter from space led to the formation of Earth.

Katrina Bello: "Tender Sun" Works created while at residency at Tusen Takk Foundation, December 21, 2023 - February 25, 2024. Commongrounds, 2nd Fl 414 East Eighth Street Traverse City, MI

Do you think there has been any significant change or turn in the direction of your work, and what has influenced that? And has living through this pandemic also affected you and your work?

Katrina Bello: The pandemic has very much affected my work in some significant ways. Even though the early part of the pandemic restricted my access to travel that I greatly count on to do my work, the restriction led me to find other resources to inform the work, which turned out to be a happy and rich discovery, and it has been part of my work ever since. This is how I came upon astronomy as the most recent resource in my work. I would not have been quite as receptive to new sources such as this because I’m typically stubborn about working with what I already have.

The pandemic was such a life changer, and I’m sure not just for me but everyone else too. Living during the pandemic taught me to be so much more flexible, open, receptive, and humble when it comes to change, time, and space. For a while I had this assumption that simultaneously being an artist and a mother, wife, immigrant, and even student at some point—would develop in me the qualities of openness, patience, and flexibility, and prepare me for the cyclone of changes that the pandemic brought upon us.

But what the pandemic revealed to me was that I was rigid, uncompromising, and protective of certain ideas, attitudes, and modes of working, and especially protective of my studio time. As challenging as it was to change and be open to new things, I’m now grateful for it.

Can you talk about your typical process for working, especially on a large-scale piece?

Katrina Bello: It’s only recently that I started working on large-scale drawings on paper. But if childhood is counted, I should really say that it’s only recently that I “returned” to working on large-scale drawings. (Katrina expands on this childhood connection in the next question.)

As for my typical process— the drawings are done on the wall to which I attach my paper. The process involves a lot of rubbing, pressing, and even pushing my hands onto the surface of the paper. It’s because the soft pastels and charcoal medium that I work with are typically crushed and mixed into a loose powder, and the only way that they can adhere to the paper is by rubbing and pressing, sometimes doing it very hard and using my body to make sure the pigments adhere to the paper. Because of the amount of detail of the drawings and the size of the surface to work on, it takes a long time to complete a single work. It takes me between 2-6 months to complete one that measures 5 by 8 feet.

One of my first large drawings in 2016 took almost 9 months to complete. The drawings also tend to appear light, and that’s because there’s very minimal pigment on them. Because of the length of time needed to execute the works, sometimes when I am asked what my medium is, my response would be time.

"Katrina Bello: Knowable Earth" Visual Arts Center of NJ

Before I start on the drawings, the research and resources that inform them begin with me exploring the landscapes of my drawings through hiking, photo and video shoots, travel, and residencies. All in all, the process is a combination of the mental and the physical. But I guess I can also add that it’s a spiritual and emotional one. The process involves so much awareness and sensitivity to not just my own life experiences and feelings, but also of the things that are happening in our society and the world around us. I think that personal or societal tragedies like pandemics and wars are felt deeply by artists; these manifest or are in some way embedded in the work. I know it is present in my own work because every circumstance I feel and think about is surely carried by my body; somehow, this is also transferred to my hands as I press and push my pigments onto the paper.

I recall this one large drawing about water that took me 6 months to complete. I started it before the pandemic and completed it before there was a vaccine available for everyone. Among the thousands on soft pastel marks and lines that I put on that drawing, some must have been heavy, desperate marks—the imprints from days of my worry and agitation from early 2020, and marks I made when family members and friends got sick or passed away. They are there among the marks I made with more consciousness of the subject I intended for the work. I titled this drawing “30,000 Tons.” The title actually refers to the volume of water that falls into Earth annually in the form of cometary particles from space (Earth: A Very Short Introduction, Martin Redfern). But the title also felt apt because of the psychic and physical weight that’s embedded in its making.

Is there anything you learned in your childhood (not necessarily about art) that you've found has a strong connection to your themes and creative vision at present?

Katrina Bello: I grew up in Davao City, a city situated in the vicinity of an extinct volcano which is also the Philippines’ highest peak, and very near a beach with black sand. My childhood was spent with much play and exposure to the natural surroundings, the tropical flora and fauna there, and the various land and water terrains. For me and my siblings, nature was our playground. As a child I was already drawing, and so drawing and nature exploration were activities I intensely explored. In fact, they were activities that I preferred to playing with other children. But the subjects of my drawings then were religious scenes, and likely influenced by the many illustrated religious and art books that my grandmother collected and shared with us. Although she was not an artist, she was a devout Catholic, a great appreciator of culture; and she loved the religious art and iconography she saw during her visits to Europe.

Perhaps for me, living as we did already so deeply immersed in physically exploring, inhabiting and collecting things in the natural world, I didn’t feel compelled to make any drawings based on nature. But the religious scenes that I drew, I drew them in large scale— they were larger than my body, in an expressive naturalism— on the concrete perimeter walls that bounded our house. Charcoal was what I used to draw with, called “uling” in Tagalog. I would take some from our outdoor kitchen.

When I became a teenager, our family moved from Davao to Manila, and not long after that, my mother and I immigrated to the United States. The immigration was unplanned and sudden, and therefore, the sense of displacement had me experiencing mixed feelings of excitement, anxiety, and fear. Living in the United States, it took some years before I started making art again. And when I did, I painted. I barely made drawings.

When I finally started taking up drawing again, almost 2 decades had passed. Interestingly, it was a return to the process of drawing that I did back in my childhood home, when I was about 10 years old—which was to draw large-scale charcoal works (this time I also added soft pastels). Although my current subjects are not religious in nature, the feelings of wonder and awe that I have for my current subjects (nature and landscapes) somehow echo the sense of wonder and awe that I had for the religious stories I tried to capture when I was a child.

I think nostalgia plays a big role in my insistence on my current subjects in drawing. After many years of living in urban environments in the United States and not being able to travel back home to Davao for many years, I must’ve developed a longing to visualize and recreate those environments. During this process of studying and getting to know my subjects, I also became aware of the many environmental issues that we are dealing with and developed a stance towards care and concern for the natural world.

"Katrina Bello’s exquisite drawings of the vast and the miniscule in nature" By The Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Why do you love working in the medium that you do?

Katrina Bello: Perhaps one of the reasons for my love of and insistence on my medium also stems from my childhood experience. When I am drawing large-scale with charcoal, I am connected to the same freedom and endless possibilities that I felt when I was a child drawing on the walls outside our home. Using loose crushed pigments that I apply against the paper directly with my fingers and the palms of my hands also has a physical quality that feels appropriate for my subjects. The process of pressing and pushing pigments against the paper on the wall is like pressing on, urging, stressing or insisting on the subject of the work, especially the urgency of the subjects.

The choice of paper as the support for my medium also seems just as appropriate. It’s simultaneously strong and fragile and is pliant and flexible: qualities that my subjects also possess. Also, there is something I find very moving in the contradictory ideas of making a very detailed large-scale drawing requiring 2-6 months of time and devotion, on a support that can be so fragile that a few drops of water can ruin its surface.

What do you hope for viewers to experience in your work?

Katrina Bello: It is my hope that viewers will have the same feelings of awe, wonder and care that I also have for the subjects of my works. I would also want viewers to feel a sense of calm, which is a recent quality that I hope the works will convey. In one of my recent shows, I felt satisfied and joyful to hear that viewers were feeling a sense of calm in the presence of the works. I also heard that a visitor even asked if the exhibition space in that show would permit a meditation session to be hosted there, because they were feeling a great sense of calm.

The sense of calm was not what I initially had in mind as a response that I desired the works to give. Even in making of the works, sometimes I feel underlying narratives that suggest chaos and conflict, since these are present in nature and the environment: death, destruction, pollution, collapse. Despite these negative aspects, I’m touched to hear that the overall effect is that of calm, and for that I am grateful.

What's up ahead/what excites you in terms of your work?

Katrina Bello: There are 2 solo exhibitions that I am currently preparing for this year, and I’m looking forward to those. But I am also excited by a new series of works that I just started. I am currently in a wonderful artist residency called Tusen Takk Foundation in Northwest Michigan, and this new series of drawings is inspired by Lake Michigan and the stones I am seeing on its shores. At the same time that I was doing research on the geologic activity that resulted in the formation of this great body of water, I was simply struck by the volatility of the lake waters: how they can rapidly change from a state of calm to one of ferociousness and back again; and also the beauty of the colors of stones as they’ve been rounded and polished by the waters for probably missions of years. The highlight of this new series is color, which I don’t use a lot of. Therefore, I’m quite excited about it.

Interviewer, Luisa A. Igloria:

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press; forthcoming 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), 12 other books, and 4 chapbooks. She is lead editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the U.S. (co-edited with Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman; Paloma Press, 2023), offered as a companion to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). Originally from Baguio City, Philippines, she makes her home in Norfolk, VA where she is the Louis I. Jaffe and University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Luisa is the 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. During her term, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship.
Website: www.luisaigloria.com

Luisa A. Igloria

Working On Gallery Past Guest Editors:

Luisa A. Igloria

"Strange Plants" - Heather Beardsley

Meg Reynolds

Francesca Preston

“I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

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Your $25 donation will be a tremendous support for Working on Gallery's future guests and running costs.

If you become a patron, your name will appear in the next Working on Gallery's article. In addition, you will receive my first poetry book, "Where I Was Born", for U.S. shipments. Or, you will receive a thank-you letter for international shipments.

Working on Gallery has been used by universities, advanced-level art lectures, and writing workshops. Your donation will help this gallery be more successful. Thank you so much - Naoko Fujimoto

"Strange Plants"

1/14/2024

This is the sixth volume of Working On Gallery Guest Editor Series. Luisa A. Igloria was my guest during the pandemic year. Since then, Igloria and I have collaborated on projects including Celebrating AAPI Writers and Creatives: Reading and Panel by the Muse Writers Center. It is absolutely fantastic to work with her.

Igloria introduced me to Heather Beardsley, and I immediately got interested in her projects.

"I hope that my work can take root in viewers’ imagination and open up their way of thinking about our relationship to the environment and the ecological crises we're facing." - - Heather Beardsley

I strongly recommend visiting Beardsley's website. Her current projects and creative processes are talked about in this interview, and also, she has sculpture and fiber projects along with her YouTube videos on her website. They are all inspirational.

Working On Gallery Past Guest Editors:
Meg Reynolds

Francesca Preston

“I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

Strange Plants, Videos

Artist Interview
Heather Beardsley

By Luisa A. Igloria

Interviewer: Luisa A. Igloria

Originally from Baguio, Philippines, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), co-winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask, winner of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize.

In 2015, Igloria was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry. A Louis I. Jaffe Professor and a professor of English and creative writing, she teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009 to 2015. Igloria also leads workshops at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and was appointed as the poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2020. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Luisa A. Igloria:

Heather Beardsley was born in Virginia Beach, VA. She received a BA in History and Art from the University of Virginia in 2009 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.

Heather was granted a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art in Vienna, Austria for the 2015-2016 academic year. She has exhibited work throughout the United States and Europe, including in New York, Chicago, Austria, Germany, Slovakia and the UK. In 2016, she was awarded a twelve-month Braunschweig Projects International Artist Scholarship by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Germany in affiliation with the Braunschweig University of Art. Recent exhibitions include Department Of at the Braunschweig University of Art, Books Undone: The Art of Altered Books at The Gallery at Penn College, and Strange Plants at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk VA.

Besides these achievements, last year she worked with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art to expand on a project they commissioned for the exhibition More Than Shelter. For this project, she made a series of bee hotels that are meant to support the native bee population in this area. This new stage of the project will work on trying to build stronger empathy and consideration of native species in the area by drawing on the folklore tradition of telling the bees about important events happening in one's life or with one's family. This will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Arts in summer 2024.

Heather Beardsley

In the fall of 2023, Heather started teaching in the Art Department at Old Dominion University, and is excited to explore additional opportunities through the university’s partnership with the Chrysler Museum’s Perry Glass Studio.

I had the good fortune to meet and hear Heather during the artist talk she gave at the opening of Strange Plants, a beautiful and uncanny meditation on the relationships between the human, built, and natural environments. (Coincidentally, I had worked with her brother James as his thesis director just before his graduation from the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.) At her talk, Heather spoke of how much of the work developed for Strange Plants came out of residencies abroad, and how she needed a form to work in that was both portable and accessible.

Besides these considerations, I asked Heather about other influences on the decision to work in these ways— mingling multimedia collage, photography, tourism, and embroidery, among other things.

Strange Plants, Animations

Heather Beardsley:

I've had a fascination with process and material exploration since I did my MFA in the Fibers and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. What attracted me to that program was the focus on how the process and material of a work can be used to reinforce the concept. Since graduating, I always try to think about how my material and technical choices can add new layers of meaning to the final piece.

When it comes to the Strange Plants series, the range of media has continued to grow over the 5-year period I’ve been working on it. It started out pretty simple, by drawing on found photographs with gel pens and making miniature sculptures in matchboxes using air dry clay and photos taken from books. Part of what has kept me so engaged in this project for so long has been that I keep finding new techniques for expanding the visual language.

When I started, I really thought this project would be limited to the three-month residency I was doing in Budapest. Towards the end of that residency, I did my first experiments sewing plants onto photographs taken from books, and that was something I wanted to continue exploring. Over time, sewing into photographs became easy for me and I started looking for new ways to challenge myself.

Visiting Kyiv in 2019 for another residency, I was inspired by the traditional textile work that is an important part of Ukrainian culture. I found hand-embroidered linens at street markets, and began to experiment with ways of combining architectural photography with traditional handcraft.

My work has an interesting relationship between the digital and analog. I do incorporate certain digital processes into my work, but often find ways to complicate them and reinsert my hand back into the process in very tedious and time-consuming ways. Combining traditional handwork techniques with the mechanical process of photography from glossy architecture books was something that felt natural. It wasn't until later that I started to ask questions about why this made sense to me.

Perhaps it was partly a desire to expand on how people view floral and plant embroidery (generally dismissed as being ‘decorative’ art). In my work, I make images using techniques and an aesthetic tied to femininity in Western culture and make these more dominant in contrast to monumental architecture made of stone, concrete, steel, and glass.

I don't know that I see my work as directly engaging with the idea of tourism—although I suppose there are a lot of environmental concerns wrapped up in that, with many historic and natural sites struggling to balance the desire for tourists to visit with the inherent degradation that comes with it. The cities I include in the series are places where I have spent a decent amount of time, feeling somewhat embedded in the culture. Using the photographs calls attention to how architecture and urban design are so ubiquitous that we often aren't consciously thinking about how they form our ideology and our sense of how society should function.

Through travel, I can see how the architecture of a society often represents its values, governmental systems, and history, and how those things intertwine. Being conscious of how our built environment can inform our ideology is crucial to understanding how we can change that ideology in the face of environmental crises.

"Strange Plants, Boxes" by Heather Beardsley. Photo by Ed Pollard.

explore this project

Why do you love working in the media that you do? Do you have a favorite?

Beardsley:

I don't think I have a favorite media on its own; it works well for me to switch between media. I have a need to do intricate work with my hands. It’s a common thread that runs through all the media I work with.

Working in a detailed, focused way helps me think more clearly about thematic elements, while also allowing me to lose myself in the process of making. When I'm very busy with the other demands of my career and I don’t have a lot of time in the studio, I can feel a tension building within me, drawing me back to making. My hands get fidgety while I'm sitting and doing administrative tasks. I definitely need to carve out studio time to feel like a healthy whole human.

Can you talk about your typical process for working, on both smaller scale and larger scale pieces?

Beardsley:

I start with an idea in my head, I don't do a lot of sketching at this point with this series. Perhaps as a result of working with the same idea for so long, a lot of times once I know the basic elements of a piece, like the dimensions of a 3D print or a composition of a photo, I get a pretty clear picture in my head of what I want the piece to look like. After that I work intuitively.

The basic parameters remain the same but each stitch or blade of grass is in response to what has been put in place before. I often treat small pieces as palate cleansers, sprinkled along the way to finishing larger, more time-consuming pieces. Sometimes I just need to sit down with a small photograph that I can finish in a couple hours. This helps with the delayed satisfaction, sometimes months delayed, of working on a larger scale. I am accustomed to working on as many as five pieces simultaneously, in different media and at different stages of production.

The older I get, the better understanding I have of what works best for me. In the past, especially when I was in school settings, there was a lot of pressure to work on one piece at a time to completion. Now I have more control over my timelines, and through several art residencies I’ve gained insight on what keeps me engaged and productive. This means my process involves working on multiple things simultaneously. They're at different points, so if I'm tired I can jump into something that is at a pure execution point and not just lose that time or risk messing up a project.

"Strange Plants, Embroidered Photographs" by Heather Beardsley. Photo by Ed Pollard.

EXPLORE THIS PROJECT

Do you think there has been any significant change or turn in the direction of your work, and what has influenced that (and has living through this pandemic also affected you and your work)?

Beardsley:

The pandemic has certainly had an impact as well. As you noted earlier, for so long a lot of my material choices were dictated by the fact that I was living a nomadic lifestyle. My work needed to be able to be packed into suitcases and brought with me on trains and planes around the world. Being rooted in one place for 2020 and 2021, while not by choice, did allow me the opportunity to increase the scale of my work in a way I had been wanting to for quite some time.

It also gave me time to incorporate new media into the series that had interested me for a while. I never had the time in my schedule to learn the necessary skills before. Suddenly, without any exhibitions or travel, time opened up so I learned how to create embroidery animations in Photoshop, and edit videos and mix sound in Final Cut Pro. Introducing time-based media into the series had been a big goal: getting to watch the growth of my works is a key element of how I experience them and I had been searching for a way to translate that for people looking at my work after it's completed.

I see many of your pieces in Strange Plants as interested in themes of time and space, the temporal and the infinite, natural and man-made environments, the miniature or intimate/private, and the expansive or public. Can you talk a little bit about these ideas and how your art gives you opportunities to embody them?

Beardsley:

Those are definitely things that I'm thinking about. Both photography and architecture create communication across generations. Our understanding of times that came before us is informed by the images and buildings that remain. I work with a lot of found materials; the images I draw and sew on are taken from second-hand books, many of them quite old. Using vintage photographs while portraying scenes that we haven't seen yet is a way for me to disrupt people's interpretation of time, and consider their place in it. What will we communicate to future generations through the structures we build today? Are we demonstrating an acknowledgment of the problems those generations will face, or are we thinking short-term about what's cheapest or easiest for now? There's a contradiction there that I seek to exploit with my work.

Often our conversations about the environment treat it as something outside of humans. The reality is, like all living creatures, we cannot live outside of the environment. Unlike other living organisms, we have been able to massively shape and reshape our environment. but that doesn't change the fact that all organisms are present in an environment. By integrating nature into built environments, I want people to consider not only how our history of industrialization is disrupting ecosystems and biodiversity on an unprecedented level, but to challenge the very dichotomy of man and nature.

My sculptures and images are meant to inspire ideas for how nature can be brought back into the natural environment, or how new structures can better consider the native ecosystems in their designs. The problems we are facing as a species are global and at a macro scale. They can be hard to process or feel optimistic about. Working on a smaller, more intimate scale, I hope will help make some thinking about these issues more accessible and less overwhelming. Our mind and body relates to miniature work in a different way— there’s a captivation with miniature versions of larger things. My miniature sculptures invite this fascination, using it to engage with topics that might otherwise feel overwhelming.

Embroidery and other kinds of handwork are still tied to historical ideas of domesticity and femininity. They are often regarded as craft media instead of fine art in Western culture because they were traditionally made by women, daughters, and mothers, working together in the privacy of the home rather than by men working in a studio. I am seeking to reconceptualize the second-hand textiles I collage and add embroidery to. When I find them in flea markets or thrift stores, they certainly are not regarded as fine art, but after I’ve altered, framed, and hung them in an art space, this work that was done by anonymous women is now regarded in a new way. I see these as collaborations, and a way of acknowledging this kind of work as being just as valid as others.

"Strange Plants, Dollhouse" by Heather Beardsley. Photo by Ed Pollard.

EXPLORE THIS PROJECT

What do you hope for viewers to experience in your work?

Beardsley:

I hope that my work can take root in viewers’ imagination and open up their way of thinking about our relationship to the environment and the ecological crises we're facing. I don't want there to be one answer or takeaway that someone leaves the work with. I'm more interested in generating questions and feelings that can then grow on their own in ways I couldn’t anticipate.

I believe a lot of what needs to change is our overall thinking about why nature is important and what is the best way for us to relate to it. The minutiae of specific solutions or steps to take won't be enough if our overall mindset doesn't change. I hope my work can spark something in the imagination that can develop in completely new and unexpected ways. If future generations grow up with a completely different view of what we owe to other species, they'll be in a much better place to implement changes and solutions.

When you're not making art, what do you like to do? What's up ahead?

Beardsley:

Honestly, I don't have a great work life balance—I’m definitely a workaholic! There's so much I need to do administratively to support my career, in addition to the teaching I need to do to supplement my income. At times both of those can feel like full-time jobs. Then I still need to find time to actually make my work, a lot of which is also incredibly time-consuming. For now that's what I feel like I have to do to accomplish my goals.

I hope in the future I am able to strike more of a balance. It would be wonderful to be in a position to outsource a lot of the administrative work, and to teach on a more part-time basis. But I love that having a home studio means I get to hang out with my dog while I'm working. She and I take walks together every day, and her regular sleep schedule has helped me maintain my own and take better care of myself.

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"Carrying out a literary project that extends beyond borders and cultures is rewarding just as it is challenging."

12/1/2023

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tint Journal

I met Lisa Schantl through Saraband Book's Zine Lunch. She participated in my workshop in January. Later, I learned that she organized Tint Journal and asked me to join their creative community. Their printed literature anthology, Tinted Trails, is just available. Their publishing & reading events are around Graz in Austria.

Order Tinted Trails

"The idea for a literary journal with this particular focus emerged during my year abroad as part of my Master’s degree in the United States. The unquestioned and solitary reign of English in this country made me experience firsthand what it meant to face prejudices and unfair grading because of one’s non-native language background." - - Lisa Schantl

All international students face this type of challenge. Some might get discouraged and abandon learning opportunities in English.

When I decided to enroll in the English Department for a bachelor's degree at Indiana University South Bend, one professor strongly rejected my application. She visited the department and asked them not to allow me to study further in advanced English classes.

Her reason was that my grade from an elementary level Shakespear class was questionable (I agreed that the grade was not good). However, I was also not able to accept a "strong rejection" as a reason for failure as an international student who came to America and wanted to study English literature, culture, and writing.

Eventually, the application reviewers and the international office had a meeting, and they denied her request. I had to take private lectures for better understanding western literature with Dr. Eileen Bender. She passed away, but it was fun to discuss books with her, including children's books by Roald Dahl. Also, it was my first-time discussing art in English. I had a fantastic two years in graduate school at Indiana University South Bend.

"I hope that our situation – and the situation of similar projects – will improve for the better as our world becomes even more connected and more aware of the importance of bridges and in-between zones." - - Lisa Schantl

It is so rare for someone to utilize their experience as an international student to create a journal for the ESL worldwide community like Schantl. I hope that many ESL writers receive encouragement from Tint Journal and make their English writing careers blossom.

It is a long journey to be published for ESL writers. But - - you are not alone - - Schantl, myself, and WE are paving our way together for each other.

"Tint Journal is the first online literary journal with an explicit focus on writers who produce creative texts in English as their second or non-native language."

visit tint journal

Could you introduce Tint Journal to our readers?

Tint Journal is an online literary magazine for writers who choose to compose their short stories, poems or creative nonfiction pieces in English as their second or non-native language (ESL). Since its beginnings in 2018, more than 200 writers from over 70 countries have been published in its digital pages, covering a wide range of genres, styles and voices.

In addition, we regularly share interviews with and reviews of books by ESL authors in our In Conversation section. Currently, our 5-year-anniversary publication is in focus: the print anthology Tinted Trails which will be out in November 2023, showcasing 35 texts by just as many ESL writers from various places and at various stages in their writing careers.

Lisa Schantl @ducks_coffee_shop

Why did you create this ESL literature community?

The idea for a literary journal with this particular focus emerged during my year abroad as part of my Master’s degree in the United States. The unquestioned and solitary reign of English in this country made me experience firsthand what it meant to face prejudices and unfair grading because of one’s non-native language background.

In a world marked by geographic and cultural movement, in which forced and voluntary migration happen on a daily basis, the language that one has grown up with speaking will probably not be the only language one ever speaks. Some people might even use a language they have learnt later in life with a proficiency gravely exceeding the level of their ‘mother tongue’.

Still, the idea persists that the only language one was supposed to creatively express themselves in was your first language. Tint Journal is one of many ways to counteract this assumption and raise awareness for the linguistic empowerment that comes along with the right to find a voice in a language of one’s own choosing.

Tint Journal

Could you tell us more about the journal process?

Tint Journal appears in a biannual rhythm, with open calls in the months of April/May and October/November. Since English is the world’s most spoken second language, we receive a high number of submissions per open call while only being able to publish about 25 texts per issue.

This selection is the result of a careful review process conducted by Tint’s main editors – John Salimbene and I for poetry, and Matthew Monroy, Andrea Färber and I for prose. As a journal publishing writing from various cultures and traditions, we do not only consider aspects such as voice, plot, and linguistic competence, but we also pay attention to style, content, and language background, to curate issues with texts that represent the diversity of non-native language writing and still work well with each other.

One feature that we are proud of is our in-depth editing. Our main editors as well as further assistant editors (by now we’re a group of 13 volunteers) are paired with the authors to discuss grammar and syntax as well as issues especially relevant to non-native language writing, such as the use of idioms, the embedding of foreign language terms, and the allusion to culture-specific narratives. The backgrounds of the volunteers engaged at Tint Journal are just as diverse as the authors we publish, and we try to support the authors’ unique voices as best as we can.

Tint Journal Reading Event

What are you hoping for next?

Carrying out a literary project that extends beyond borders and cultures is rewarding just as it is challenging. Due to Tint’s transnational character, funds are hard to get and the only way we have been able to stay active over the past years was through volunteer work and without paying neither the writers nor the artists.

I hope that our situation – and the situation of similar projects – will improve for the better as our world becomes even more connected and more aware of the importance of bridges and in-between zones. There is only one way to move forward, and that is with an open mind and respect for everyone and everything on this planet. I hope that Tint Journal can make a small but valuable contribution on this route.

Lisa Schantl is the founder and editor-in-chief of Tint Journal, and an assistant at treffpunkt sprachen at the University of Graz where she also researches translingual literature. In addition, she freelances as cultural organizer and translator. She studied English and American Studies as well as Philosophy at the University of Graz and Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her writings and translations have appeared in Asymptote, manuskripte, PubLab, The Hopper, The Normal Review, UniVerse, Versopolis and more. She has received various grants and scholarships, most recently the KUNSTRAUM STEIERMARK scholarship for 2023-24.

Support Working on Gallery

Your $25 donation will be a tremendous support for Working on Gallery's future guests and running costs.

Working on Gallery has been used by universities, advanced-level art lectures, and writing workshops. Your donation will help this gallery be more successful.

Thank you so much - Naoko Fujimoto

"Words fail, translations fail, but form transcends—image makes meaning no matter the language."

11/1/2023

I met Danielle Pieratti when we were classmates at the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference. Some people asked why I did not choose Asian or ekphrasis lectures because I wanted to learn Italian translation processes.

I thought that the Italian concepts of culture and language might be similar to those of 7th - 11th century Japanese literature, which was my project at the conference. I wanted to observe how Italian translators approach interpreting original Italian ideas into English. I was so glad my instinct was correct because I met top notch Italian translators there.

Danielle Pieratti translated Laura Pugno's Sirene - - poetic, yet dark and strange hybrid cultures of east and west - - at Bread Loaf. The story has a futuristic fictional setting. It could be a cool graphic novel, but this translation is full of poetic instances and does not have any illustrations.

"If the act of translating constitutes a violence, the incorporation of visuals comes to constitute a rejection of language akin to embracing untranslatability." - - Danielle Pieratti

I started understanding her creative philosophy when I read her process interview today. She talked about her new translation project. Dante’s Purgatorio is the perfect text to experiment in-between.

If ekphrasis is a literary description of art, we may be able to reverse or expand. Pieratti's process is a visual description of translation and its original text. Again, I realized that translation itself is an act of creativity.

Danielle Pieratti

The poems I’m currently working on trouble the boundaries between translation and originality by borrowing a significant portion of their language from English translations of Dante’s Purgatorio.

I started working on this project in November of 2022, just a few weeks after my son, then 12, was diagnosed with leukemia. It seemed then that the relatively short-term sacrifices we’d have to make to ensure his positive long-term prognosis had landed us in a kind of limbo that only exacerbated the bleak holding pattern that for many has characterized the years since Covid.

In my attempts to process both, I found myself turning to visuals each time I struggled to synthesize through language. It had already become clear that working in a hybrid space on a “derivative” work was going to require some visual flexibility; in a bilingual work of translation, facing pages are usually presented as equivalents of one another, and I began by experimenting with that construct.

In the process of considering how I wanted readers to interact with a hybrid collection I started thinking about the ways reading, writing, and translation might be figured materially, not least because each had begun to resonate more fully than ever with what was going on in my home life. There are experiences that leave nothing in your life untouched, so that even banal activities—driving to work, cooking dinner, reading, knitting—all begin to take on new, interdependent meanings.

I wanted to capture visually the synthesis between, for example, a rare astronomical event, a homeschooled unit on astronomy, and a canto from Purgatorio in which Virgil teaches Dante about the stars. In return, the visual experiments gave me new points of entry into my written work.

How to Watch the Green Comet While You Still Can or, "In which you get a lesson on what earth is to the stars", Danielle Pieratti

I think working in multiple languages broadens one’s understanding of what a language is and can be. This is a cliché notion, of course—languages don’t have to be verbal, and translation has been applied as a metaphor to all kinds of communication, linguistic or otherwise. But poet-translators in particular have made frequent use of visuals in hybrid works.

I’m thinking of Anne Carson, whose translations make stirring, sometimes playful use of visuals, and Don Mee Choi, who presents photography as just one of many types of translation (and non-translation) in her work. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Cecilia Vicuña’s Instan, and Divya Victor’s Curb are other examples of translingual works—works that stage, highlight, or reflect relationships between and across languages—that incorporate visual language as one among many.

If the act of translating constitutes a violence, the incorporation of visuals comes to constitute a rejection of language akin to embracing untranslatability. Words fail, translations fail, but form transcends—image makes meaning no matter the language. I’ve found this to be true not only as a poet beginning to experiment with visual poetics, but as a reader observing that the most striking imagery retains its power no matter how it’s translated.

"Chemo cap with text from Purgatorio", Danielle Pieratti

A new way to figure translation that I’ve begun to experiment with is the movable page. Movable books were common during Dante’s era, and today’s most obvious iteration is the pop-up book, which makes use of constructions like moving tabs and volvelles to reveal or conceal meaning. I want these new visuals to play with the idea of equivalence and replacement—translation as a shadow (to use a frequent image from Dante) that either conceals or is concealed by the source text, emphasizing the power dynamics between the two by disallowing simultaneous versions to coexist.

In this respect the movable components comment on the politics of translation but also on the stakes of translingualism, which often reflect the complex, sometimes painful varieties of linguistic masking and/or passing that navigating between languages can require.

"River : River" No.1, Danielle Pieratti

Even my own unencumbered experience of multilingualism still reflects familial and historical pressures that heavily impact my linguistic identity. My father’s name was Arno, and he’s pictured below, alongside an illustration of the Arno River—the Florentine waterway beside which Dante claims, in Inferno 23, to have been born, and which features intermittently in his Commedia.

My father was born in the Bronx, but during the years we lived in Italy his immaculate Italian marked him easily as a native, even in professional settings. He died of cancer in 1997, his Italian forever calcified into the dark mythology I preserve for him. Our son, Luke Arno, is named after him.

"River : River" No.2, Danielle Pieratti

Danielle Pieratti is the author most recently of Approximate Body (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2023). Her first book, Fugitives, (Lost Horse Press 2016) was selected by Kim Addonizio for the Idaho Prize and won the Connecticut Book Award for poetry. Additional honors include The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize, as well as fellowships from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference. Transparencies, her translated volume of poems by Italian poet Maria Borio, was released by World Poetry Books in 2022. Danielle is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Connecticut, where her work merges contemporary poetry, literary translation, and translingual writing studies.

Support Working on Gallery

Your $25 donation will be a tremendous support for Working on Gallery's future guests and running costs.

Working on Gallery has been used by universities, advanced-level art lectures, and writing workshops. Your donation will help this gallery be more successful.

Thank you so much - Naoko Fujimoto

Writing and Unwriting: The Asemic Work of Karla Van Vliet

10/1/2023

Karla Van Vliet

You have no idea how much my mind is blown right now.

My belief was completely flipped, and I am thankful for my guest editor, Meg Reynolds, introducing me to asemic writing in her interview with Karla Van Vliet.

So what exactly is 'asemic' writing? - Asymptote Journal

"I think asemic writing is a wordless, open semantic form of writing that is international in its mission...The secret is that asemic writing is a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing. It uses the constraints of writerly gestures and the full developments of abstract art to divulge its main purpose: total freedom beyond literary expression. The subcultural movement surrounding asemic writing is international because the creators of asemic works live all over the world. It's a global style of writing we are creating, with the creators of asemic works meeting up on the Internet to share our works and exchange ideas." - - Michael Jacobson

Then, why is my mind blown?

My grandmother is a Japanese calligrapher who is ninety-six years old, and she still teaches. I was taught each stroke and each letter has a specific meaning when I calligraphed. I had practiced calligraphy every Saturday evening with my grandmother from the age of five until adulthood. I occasionally practiced in the early morning on Sunday - - crying, ideally joyfully - - when I learned the meaning of shapes, brush speeds, and letters' narratives. I had a perfect example for the proof.

Fujimoto Ousyuu (藤本鷗舟）

This is my grandmother's work. She wrote Isamu Yoshii's poem, "I should not write a love poem for my first draft" (summarized translation). In other words, you may not scribble until you decide on words with the specific feeling in your mind.

When I scribbled, my grandmother said, "Your brush will be rumpled!"

But, asemic writing is not just scribbling.

Asemic writing is "a global style of writing", and it is an expressing of inner minds that is not easily described with words. And it is also activates the readers' sensory processing. It may be corny to ask, "Am I allowed to do that?" If so, the possibilities of my writing will be expanded.

Karla Van Vliet’s newest books are She Speaks in Tongues (Anhinga Press,) a collection of poems and asemic writings, and Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings (Shanti Arts.) She is the winner of the Bacopa Literary Review’s Visual Poetry Award, a Finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound chapbook prize, a finalist for the Tenth Gate Prize, a Forward Prize, a three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, nominee.

Van Vliet’s paintings have been featured in Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate. Van Vliet is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal. She is the creator and curator of Van Vliet Gallery, and an Integrative Dreamwork analyst.

Guest Editor, Interviewer: Meg Reynolds

As a writing teacher, I have continuously worked with students of all ages to seek and find their written voice and transcribe it onto the page. Beyond the work of letters, phonemes, and punctuation, I have often asked myself, what lives beneath language? What lives inside the urge to write?

My students sense the impulse, but often struggle, as many of us do, to translate the feeling of their ideas into written expression. Writing is an embodied act, but often their ideas crumble within the confines of writing conventions. They get lost in what they’ve been taught, feel inadequate, and lose the thread of what they wanted to say. Sometimes it is profoundly important to labor through these challenges to find their writing voices honed and shining on the other side. However, in the work of Karla Van Vliet, there is another path.

Van Vliet’s asemic writing floods and leaps across the page, bending and blending mediums, so that the writing impulse closely aligns with its physical expression outside of the confines of writing itself. What happens when writing is unbound from writing? As you will see in Van Vliet’s work, work of extraordinary heart, fluidity and craft.

“BALLAD OF THE SHORE” Karla Van Vliet

Meg Reynolds: Tell me about your history with visual poetry. What led you to it? What does it mean to you?

Karla Van Vliet:

My first entrance into visual poetry emerged from learning Chinese brush painting. I first worked in Chinese brush painting at a two hour workshop at the Lincoln Library in Lincoln, VT. Our instructor, Yinglei Zhang, was a practitioner and became an influence of mine in the practice.

When I began painting, it was as though I had used the materials since I was born. Rice paper is unforgiving. Any mark that you make on the paper is permanent, even the earliest tentative marks. And even when these early marks are overlaid with firmer, darker ink, the first marks will be seen as ghost marks. You can learn to use these “mistakes” or “accidents” in your paintings as a technique. What is lovely, or what you might wish were different, is that the painting carries its history, much as we do in our bodies. Yet there is a brilliance in this, which is that they inform us and that they can lead to opportunities further down the line. They become part of your vocabulary.

“VOICE SURGE” Karla Van Vliet

Traditionally brush paintings often include a poem. With the guidance of my brush painting teacher, I wrote poems in Chinese. Or as my teacher put it, paragraphs in Chinese (what I wrote followed none of the strict rules of Chinese poetry.) It felt like a way I could bring two parts of my creative expression together as I am also a poet. Ultimately I took the rules I was given and modified them.

Traditionally, I would have painted copies of existing images for years in a kind of apprenticeship before developing my own brush paintings, but my instructor said, “You’re American. You can do what you want.” So I used the techniques to begin painting Vermont landscapes and developed my own way of working with Chinese characters.

Because I don’t know Chinese, to create writings meant searching for characters by meaning and visual impression. Once I had the characters, I integrated them into my paintings. At first in a more traditional way, and then more and more as larger components in the composition of the paintings.

“HER STORY” Karla Van Vliet

Several years ago, five in November, I dreamt of asemic writing flowing over a full moon; the image fell over and over all night. I was an observer in the dream, taking in frame after frame of written marks and the moon glowing behind them.

I had been introduced to the genre of asemics a few months before. Someone mentioned my work had an asemic feel to it. I didn’t know what asemics were so I did some investigating. I was interested but not until I had the dream did I start using it in my work. As an aside, I’m a dreamwork analyst; I take dreams seriously. So, when I had the dream, I knew there was something important in the practice for me.

“THE SOURCE, MOON SERIES II” Karla Van Vliet

I started painting with inks and created many small book-page-like images. That spring I proposed to my publisher, Shanti Arts, a collection of asemic paintings accompanied by an essay on asemic writing which was published in January of 2021, as “Fluency.”

Later Kristine Snodgrass, of Anhinga Press, reached out to me wanting to publish my work. The book that came of that is “She Speaks Tongues,” a collection of poems and asemic writings.

Order from Anhinga Press

You work in asemic writing. Can you talk more about how your work explores and typifies the genre?

Asemics is not thought of as the gesture of writing by all those who practice it, but because I come to it as a writer, a poet, I have thought of asemics as a way to keep my hand in the practice of writing. The brilliant poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly once said to me that we should honor the silences between times of writing. Instead of beating ourselves up about not writing, “am I a poet if I haven’t written a poem in so long?!” that we should think of those times as a part of the practice of writing, a gathering time.

When asemics entered my life, I was in one of those quiet times. I found a kind of grounding in the gesture of writing, a gathering, without the need for words or even an understanding of my written expression, or even what I wanted to express. It was after the fall of 2016 when election results laid bare the difficult realities and history of our country and I thought of my continued expression as defiance against that which the elected administration stood for.

My work is more closely linked to writing “form” than other asemic artists. That is, I usually “write” from left to right or from top down. Others are not as tied to this convention. What I am seeing now, in my current work, is the placement of my asemics within a painting, much like the Chinese poem is used, to balance a painting.

“EARLY MORNING MURMUR THE CHICKADEES” Karla Van Vliet

Someone, I believe Michael Jacobson, one of the fathers of modern asemics, has amended the definition of asemic writing on Wikipedia with “a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context.” I like this very much. But still there is the question of meaning.

"On Asemic Writing, Michael Jacobson" Asymptote Journal

People often ask me what the writing says. I say, whatever it says to you… and that can change. If I were going to rename the movement, I would call it parasemic, meaning “side by side”. Of course, a mark can’t have no meaning. A line in the sand has plenty of meaning. The meaning is intuited or perceived, each with their own understanding.

“SINGING WITH THE NIGHTINGALE” Karla Van Vliet

Where do you begin with your pieces? What materials do you use and explore and in what ways does your creative voice (color choice, composition, etc) guide you in building the work?

With my newer pieces, to begin, I take a piece of watercolor paper and I draw out where different components will be. I get out my paper cutter and I cut horizon lines. Using acrylic matte medium, I mix in my pigment(s), and then I paint into spaces. I use a variety of techniques to add texture and color, spritz it with water and/or sprinkle in other pigments. In order to create the finished image, I have an exacting collage process where I layer my treated pieces of paper onto a board.

In both my artwork and poetry, I have a process of stilling myself to listen to the symbols and colors of my work (stone, water, birds, and so on), and intuitively decide how each element corresponds to itself to balance into the space of the artwork. I have a few pigments that are my favorites. Also, the horizon line has an important presence in my artwork.

In my early years I lived in Lincoln, VT. I would walk out behind our house on South Mountain to a place at the top of the cliffs looking west. You could see an amazing view of the Adirondacks, a horizon of layered mountains. That image has stayed with me. It is one of my earliest memories, and the image touched me deeply. Likely it was the beginning of seeing and collecting images from the landscape around me that I would later mine for my poetry and my artwork.

“CONFESSIONS IN THE LIGHT” Karla Van Vliet

What relationship does asemic writing have to contemplation? Do you have contemplative practice and if so, how does it feed your work?

I grew up as a Quaker, sitting in silence. As a child I learned this quiet space was where one connected with the light (divine) within. Also, as a child I couldn’t sit quietly for an hour and my sister and I were allowed to leave the building and walk down the dirt road to the creak and back as the service continued. I remember the quality of the light, the bird calls, the shadows thrown by stones in the gravel road. This noticing became associated with that space of contemplation. And again, I collected these images.

I often thought of myself born a bird, in this world but not really of it in some way. For years I had a spiritual practice connected to this way of being. I was described as ethereal. Strange to me but also understandable. But more recently I have felt a shift. I feel that this part of my life is centered around learning to be in my body in the world, on the earth. I think it is the opposite of many, to find the earth later in life rather than finding a “spiritual” practice later in life. The way I think of it is that living on the earth is a spiritual practice. In the language of Jesus, Aramaic, heaven and earth can be in the same place, are in the same place.

“AVA SERIES IV” Karla Van Vliet

My contemplative practice is about becoming as close to myself as possible and to live from that self as much as I can. This doesn’t always look meditative, because becoming close to myself involves all of me, all of my feelings, not just the pleasant ones. My paintings and poetry are containers for this way of being.

How that shows itself in my creative work is that I listen for that inner voice and how it wants to communicate, express in the world, and then I do that. It’s very intuitive. Following the small voice within even when it doesn’t make sense in my mind. Why would I cut the painting there? Use that color? But I do it anyway.

Also, painting, writing, asemic writing, are all places, I sometimes think, where I work to create order, or stillness, or a calmness. As one who carries trauma it is one of the ways I process those traumas in myself. I think this is the quality that people see in my work and call Buddhist.

“CADENCE XVIII” Karla Van Vliet

Who inspires you as you work? Who are some of your earliest visual and poetic influences?

Adrian Rich, Audre Lorde, and Mary Oliver were my first poetic influences. Mary Oliver resonated with my connection to nature imagery and Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde for their bravery in speaking their truth, which I needed to do for myself. They gave me a blueprint for doing that. Also, Denise Levertov, Isak Dinesen, early W.S. Merwin. Visually, the landscape of Vermont where I grew up, and such disparate artists as Rothko, Charles Mackintosh and Frida Kahlo. And of course, so many others in so many ways.

At the moment I am reading the brilliant book What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, a nonfiction book about her experience and investigation of Complex PTSD. I’m also reading Kate Partridge’s new book THINE, which is lovely, and The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster which I find very inspiring. Other recent loves: Meg Kearney’s “All Morning the Crows,” Melissa Kwasny’s work, Tom Pickard’s “Fiends Fell,” and Jerry Saltz’s “Art is Life.”

“THE CURIOUS” Karla Van Vliet

What are you currently working on?

My current work is inspired by the river, an inspiration I come back to time and again. There is this lovely little book I discovered via Robert MacFarlane, who wrote the foreword, called “The Water Glossary” by Carol Anne Connolly. It’s a collection of Irish words for or about water. The definitions are fantastic (“gall-shion – severe weather, as if it blew from a strange country”) and it inspired me to create a series of paintings. They are abstracted sky | rock | water | asemics, and recently I’ve added birds, mostly crows/ravens to the pieces.

I am working on paper using acrylic medium and pigments, many of the pigments created from my own flowers. I mount the pieces to a cradle board and seal them so they can be hung as is and not have to be put under glass.

Thinking back to the first question; these paintings have a relationship to those early brush paintings with “poem.” Each one also incorporates asemic writing into them, much like a traditional brush painting. Interesting. Hmmmm.

“A CALL INTO THE SPACIOUS SHADOW” Karla Van Vliet

Working On Gallery Past Guest Editors:
Meg Reynolds

"MR: Who are you making this for? mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself."

Francesca Preston

“I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

Support Working on Gallery

Your $25 donation will be a tremendous support for Working on Gallery's future guests and running costs.

Working on Gallery has been used by universities, advanced-level art lectures, and writing workshops. Your donation will help this gallery be more successful.

Thank you so much - Naoko Fujimoto

Happy Summer!

9/3/2023

It has been one year since I started interviewing writers and translators for Tupelo Quarterly and RHINO Reviews. Working On Gallery is now entering its fourth year.

When I have opportunities to meet them, I feel that I am in a candy shop making a deluxe ice cream corn! I am honored to have a great time with them, and thankful for their insights.

Working On Gallery has taken a turn in January 2023. I still curate articles, and I have also been inviting guest editors to make this website more exciting.

"MR: Who are you making this for? mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself."

7/16/2023

It was coincidental to learn two different approaches to ERASURE projects by two African American creators, Gary Simmons and m. mick powell on the same weekend.

Gary Simmons currently has an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until October 1st, 2023. Simmons' erasure is a smudging effect on race, class, and gender identity issues. The smearing techniques draw attention to historical problems and discrimination more vividly.

My guest editor, Meg Reynolds, had an interview with m. mick powell.

"When I created the “ERASURE” piece that features a cut-up photo of Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, and their daughter Bobbi Kristina, ...Whitney shares that Bobby would cut her head off of photographs in their home. So I came to a cosmological red: I was thinking of fire, flame, fame, blood, anger, passion, “seeing red,” a spectacular survival." - - m. mick powell

Cut her head off of photographs, which is a realization for me. How many women are purposely deleted from our society? How do we ignore the history that created the current "us"? It is important that m. mick powell makes a statement and develops her projects further.

"...Whitney Houston, who was treated so cruelly throughout her career,...when media outlets mocked her while she was emaciated and struggling with addiction. For some, those are the only (or most prominent) images they recall of her. So I want to disrupt those damning and damaging moments (while knowing that they are part of her life and legacy) and ask us to remember her as close as we can get to the girl who she was." - - m. mick powell

Past Guest Editors:
Francesca Preston

“I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

The aliveness of dead girl cameo: the Collage Work of martina mick powell

Guest Editor: Meg Reynolds

In my first art history class, my professor walked our class through the arts center to the gallery where there was an exhibition of Byzantine religious icons. The flat shimmering triptychs she showed us were entirely new to me.

The distance between myself and the images only lengthened when my professor explained that these icons would have lived in the homes of the wealthy as objects of spiritual contemplation. Wealthy supplicants would stare at and through the image of saints as though they were stained glass shot through with light and lose themselves in the experience of god.

How can we compare a pop star and a saint?

Both perform miracles. Both astonish and overwhelm. Both develop feverish followings and become objects of intense public focus. Ultimately, both are human and mortal, subject to the violence and trial that often accompanies so much attention. The difference is that in the age of social media, television, tabloid newspapers, and so on, images of the pop star are widely available and ravenously consumed. The systemic injustices that plague specific groups like Black, femme individuals are amplified under the public’s gaze. Their image and the human being are under the constant heat of attention and the icon, saint, person under contemplation must struggle to survive it.

In the digital collage work of martina mick powell, we see renewed visions pop icons like Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, and Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopez amongst others that are as prismatic and incantatory as stained glass.

However, unlike Byzantine triptychs, powell’s work complicates the relationship to and, in some cases, implicates the viewer with the power of her poetry woven within the image. One cannot view her collages without contemplating the vibrance of her subjects’ as well the struggles they experienced and what role the public played in both their suffering and success.

Many of the artists powell centers in her work are Black women artists who died, in powell’s words “too young, too tragically,” often at the height of their powers. In powell’s work, we are asked to return to these faces and contemplate the distance or proximity to the human lives shimmering within them. Whether we see these figures as tragic or exemplary (or both), they are celebrated in powell’s dynamic work.

Meg Reynolds: First off, tell me more about you as an artist and what led you to the collage work you are doing now.

martina mick powell: For years, I turned to analog collaging as a sort of self-care craft practice, low stakes. Always text with images, typically pulled from magazines marketed towards femmes and girls.

It wasn’t until the pandemic started in March 2020 that I turned to digital collage out of a desire for a larger archive of text and images and a lack of a color printer. Much of the digital collage work I’m doing now is connected to my archival poetic project, dead girl cameo.

In dead girl cameo I examine the intersections of celebrity, Black sexualities, intimate partner violence, industry abuse, and death by focusing on the experiences of Black women artists who died too young, too tragically, like Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Minnie Riperton, Tammi Terrell, and others.

MG: Can you tell me more about your process?

mmp: Collages often open for me with an image—typically a photograph of a Black artist who I’m engaging with in my poetic work, who I admire, and/or whose particular photograph has captured my attention.

I’m initially attracted to the energy of an image and both the colors that appear in the photograph and the colors that come up within me when I encounter it. I love learning more about the picture’s history—the photographer who captured it, where, why, and at what point in the artist’s career. So many of those details make their way into the collage’s layers.

Also, my current collage practice is so intimately connected to my poetic practice but the position of the collage in relation to a poem can differ. Sometimes a collage will come before a poem and the subsequent poem will be a sort of ekphrastic on the collage. Sometimes I’m struggling with and through a poem, so I’ll turn to collage to help me access color and texture, to help me come closer to the artist I’m writing about. And, more often, collage is a major component of my revision process.

I ask myself: What can this collage teach me about the layers within the poem? About form? About repetition? About perspective and persona?

A good example of this is the relationship between my collage “GAYLETTER” and my poem “annotation: Frank Ocean performs Good Guy live at Exposition Park.” The poem, an ekphrastic piece on a performance where Frank Ocean forgets the only lyric on Blonde where he uses the word “gay,” preceded the collage.

I struggled so deeply in my revision process of this poem, particularly around form, so I turned to Photoshop and back to the images used in Frank’s interview with GAYLETTER Magazine in 2019, one of his first LGBTQ+ media outlet interviews.

The background text is from the coming out letter Frank posted on his personal Tumblr in 2012. It wasn’t until I duplicated, softened, and dissolved his photograph and set it against a trippy, wavy pink background layered with the coming out letter that I was able to figure out a form that I think works well with the poem.

Last thing here! Whenever a collage features my own poetry, the images are coming from a physical, personal place. In the “Pay Per View” or “PPV” pieces, the background image is a photograph I took of a clearing in my favorite state forest.

The central image comes from my small collection of archival Black erotica magazines and books, so it’s an image that I have physical access to. So those collages are definitely spaces where the material/physical connect with the digital for me.

MG: What about collage attracts your attention?

mmp: Digital collage has made me increasingly excited about the glitch (in a way that feels impossible for me in poetry). As an emerging artist, each time I use Photoshop, I’m learning something new about what it can do to my images.

I’m so enthralled by how a series of relatively unassuming clicks can create a brand new effect, how accidentally selecting a tool can fuck up a collage in the most gorgeous of ways.

For example, in “SUEDE BLUE” I went to erase some of the excess from the flowers, but ended up dragging their colors across the entire page. I adored that effect and truly would not know how to replicate it. In these moments, I’m forever thankful for and thinking of Legacy Russell’s conceptualization of the glitch as “digital orgasm,” as “the catalyst, not the error.”

So I’m attracted to collage because it allows me this space of visual play and freedom. Collage makes me feel uninhibited enough to pursue my natural inclinations, to layer, to slice, to dissolve, to add color, to strip color, to repeat an image over and over again until it creates a new dimension, to blur, to soften, to sharpen, to invert, to pervert. I think I’m attracted to the inherently perverted nature of collage.

MG: Color seems to be profoundly important in your images. What inspires your use of color?

mmp: The colors originate from the aura and energies of the photographs I’m working with and are then layered and rerendered by what I learn from the archives.

When I created the “ERASURE” piece that features a cut-up photo of Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, and their daughter Bobbi Kristina, I had just rewatched Whtiney’s 2009 interview with Oprah where Whitney shares that Bobby would cut her head off of photographs in their home.

So I came to a cosmological red: I was thinking of fire, flame, fame, blood, anger, passion, “seeing red,” a spectacular survival. In my collage “TO THOSE OF EARTH” the color scheme and the text overlay were drawn from the promotional poster for Aaliyah’s first studio album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” written and produced by the defamed superstar and convicted sexual abuser R. Kelly, specifically for Aaliyah when she was 14 years old.

I wanted to reframe her: a direct stare, no sunglasses, young still, but older. I think I’ve enhanced my use of color over time by putting the palettes in direct conversation with the archive.

MG: What role does elegy play in these images, particularly of Aaliyah and Whitney Houston?

mmp: Like I mentioned before, collage has been so instrumental in my process as I’ve worked on dead girl cameo, which I’m certainly thinking about as an extended eulogy. So in the pieces that feature Whitney, Aaliyah, Left Eye, Minnie Riperton, and other artists I work with in the collection, I’m definitely trying to memorialize and immortalize them in a way.

I’m obsessed with images of these women, especially when the emotion of the artist is one that conveys joy, pain, pleasure, secrecy, release, youth, life. In the collages, we get to see these women as alive—as complex.

In my Whitney Houston “OBIT” collage, I was interested in juxtaposing an image of a young, bright, sequined, and smiling Whitney with the New York Times’ headline for her obituary. First, I’m always interested in complicating our emotions around death and I hope this image does some of that work, and secondly, I want to acknowledge that this is the girl and the woman we killed (“we” as a collective audience, collective consumers). How should we remember her?

MR: It is so clear that each figure you feature in your work appears both as icons and as human beings. Is this your goal?

mmp: Yes, this is absolutely a goal of mine—to humanize the artists as much as I can and to get everyone else invested in engaging with them as human beings and to share context and stories about their lives that hopefully help bring them closer to us.

I also think of this especially when I focus on artists like Whitney Houston, who was treated so cruelly throughout her career, particularly from 2000-2007, when media outlets mocked her while she was emaciated and struggling with addiction. For some, those are the only (or most prominent) images they recall of her. So I want to disrupt those damning and damaging moments (while knowing that they are part of her life and legacy) and ask us to remember her as close as we can get to the girl who she was.

MR: How do you make decisions about which texts to include, especially when the text is not your own?

mmp: When I borrow text, I’m usually either borrowing from the artist’s personal archive (interviews, blog posts, lyrics, etc.) or from what I’m reading concurrently, which is almost always something by Ntozake Shange.

Text for me functions as another contextual layer to help me centralize a theme or a thought. In “ERASURE,” the background text is from a 1993 Seventeen Magazine feature where women celebrities described the moment they met their partners.

In Whitney’s, she writes, “To some people, we were—and still are—a mismatched couple. [Bobby] has this image as a bad boy in the music industry and I’m the good girl…None of that matters because we’re crazy about each other.” I’m so intrigued about the way Whitney talks about Bobby in 1993 versus how she talks about him in the 2009 Oprah interview I mentioned before.

The collage is in conversation with all of these moments and more, and I try to make those connections apparent by borrowing relevant text, such as the Seventeen Magazine feature in this piece.

MR: In both PPV images, the figure and your poetry both have vibrant and complex things to say about desire. How do you discuss desire in your work?

mmp: I hope that I’m discussing desire as the lovely, messy, complicated, layered, intense, fascinating, fucked up entity that it is. I’m particularly interested in the origins of desire; the major and minor cataclysms that create our pleasure propensities. In dead girl cameo, I’m also thinking a lot about the conflation of death and desire for me—how difficult it is for me to separate the two.

MR: Who are you looking at and reading as you make this work?

mmp: I’m always reading something by Ntozake Shange, which is why her words often appear in my collages.

Other favorite poets of mine include June Jordan, Morgan Parker, Ai, Tiana Clark. I’m working through Wanda Coleman’s selected poems Wicked Enchantment now, and enchanted I am indeed!

My favorite artists are Mickalene Thomas (of course), Ming Smith, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Laura Aguilar, Petra Collins. I’m always listening to Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Frank Ocean, Minnie Riperton, Noname, Orion Sun, WILLOW, Sade, Tammi Terrell, Chaka Khan, Rihanna. Especially when I’m working on a collage featuring a musician, I’m definitely listening to their discography as I’m creating.

MR: Who is your ideal audience? Who are you making this for?

mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself.

“I feel like my legs have been cut off.” - Introducing Lauren Ari, Guest Editor: Francesca Preston

6/18/2023

I am so excited to have the third article by guest editors for Working On Gallery.

Francesca Preston introduces Lauren Ari who is a Richmond-based sculptor and painter. Her work is poetic and philosophical. Her art show has been well received. It may be a bit old, but there is a You Tube video that shows her ceramic works that can give you context. She also had a great profile in the Fouladi Project and its studio visit.

You may also like Preston's past article about her creative process.

Past Guest Editor - Lúcia Leão

"Rooster’s Wake Up Call" - Paper, Acrylic, Clay - Lauren Ari

Circumstances Happen, & I Follow Them

Introducing Lauren Ari
Guest Editor: Francesca Preston

Lauren Ari and I first met many years ago at a class called the Drawing Circus. It wasn’t so much of a “class” as an opportunity to make self-directed art within a constantly shifting cacophony of moving models, objects, light & music.

The teacher’s name was Ed Stanton, and he was notorious. (Once, in the middle of a session, a half-nude model pulled a boa constrictor out of her attache case.) Lauren and I were drawn to each other like ants to honey. Perhaps there was a certain hunger, or visual language, we recognized in each other. We had each been to our own version of the underworld, and the class was like a weekly godsend.

I was coming out of a health crisis, and during the class discovered my signature sumi ink on vintage paper pieces, which Lauren described as “impossibly elegant.” “You were so cool,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d want anything to do with me!” Lauren was in the first years of raising a daughter, and finally clawing her way back to art practice.

I remember her saying, with a brusqueness and humor typical of Lauren, “I feel like my legs have been cut off.” I adored this honesty. No sugar coating. And no wonder the body so often figures in various forms of transformation or truncation in Lauren’s work. “Most of my life is about trying to keep myself steady,” she says now.

"Amphetype" - Clay - Lauren Ari

"Diastole of Your Heart" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Wood Panel, Acrylic - Lauren Ari

We lost touch for years, and reconnected during the pandemic, after Lauren read my newsletters and piece for Working on Gallery. She invited me to her studio for tea and small molasses cookies.

I felt a shocking lust for her artwork. I wanted to touch everything I saw, take her sculptures and dictionary pages home with me, learn their sharp curves and lick their buttery edges. Words and faces lace many of her pieces. As a poet and mark-maker, I feel at home in her earthy, papery terrain. (But I am envious of her prolific nature!)

"Dirt is Not Dirty Till its Out of Place" - Red Clay Plate - Lauren Ari

"Bending Toward Being" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Acrylic - Lauren Ari

Soon after, I visited her show DREAMFORMS, at the Richmond Art Center in the East Bay of California, where our Drawing Circus class first set up its wild tents.

I remember Lauren saying that a gallery is not the ideal place for her work; she wants her art to be surrounded by people living and eating, by the joyous jumble of a cafe or a garden. And yet, her vivid paintings on pages cut from an old Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, and large multi-layered clay urns dreamily intended for recomposted remains, seemed to become eerily animate as they sent sparks across the space.

"Bed of Beasts" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Acrylic - Lauren Ari

"Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil" - Clay Urn - Lauren Ari

About her own work, Lauren Ari writes:

My art making has been a source of refuge and meditation. My studio is where I revisit what happens in a day, both internally and externally. I rarely have a particular agenda except to follow what wants to arise.

Ari Studio

I work with many materials, but the foundation of my art always comes back to drawing. Working in clay, wood, metal, and textile enables my drawings to be three-dimensional.

"Cause and Effect" - Unglazed Clay - Lauren Ari

I feel my artwork speaks from a freedom of process that can be difficult for many to achieve. When you look closely, you feel as if you've gone — with my permission — into the recesses of my mind, where light and dark co-exist. I suppose my gift is that I am able to quiet the judgmental, critical mind, and keep moving.

My process is like traveling. I might start with a drawing, then do a little writing about the drawing. Then I might take the drawing and create a sculpture related to it. I bounce around between different mediums within a day, and it’s a bit like having a conversation. Each material inspires something different within me.

"Lost" - Charcoal, Paint, Wood Glue, Ink on Paper - Lauren Ari

"Spilling Over" - Acrylic and Collage - Lauren Ari

The energy that creates my art is faster and more capricious than my actual self; I feel as though it moves me and moves through me. I trust something bigger than myself. A lot of what I do is intuitive; I don't set out with an agenda, method or finished product in mind. Circumstances happen, and I follow them. When a piece wants to come out of me, I have to move fast. This is heaven. And the best feeling for me is when someone feels met in my art, so that they're moved to take a piece home with them as a reminder of their own inner freedom.

"Falling of Olga" - 1914 Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary Page - Acrylic - Lauren Ari

"Empathy" - Clay Plate - Lauren Ari

"Lauren Ari's art roars out of the deepest part of her psyche and arrives with great tenderness into the world. It is fiercely honest, playful and provocative. She speaks directly what is still unfettered in all of us, our wild, free, animal selves."

— Poet Alison Luterman

Lauren Ari is an artist and educator based in Richmond, California. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts from U.C. Davis after undergraduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design and CCAC. Her primary focus is on drawing and sculpture. Lauren's work is in the permanent collections of the Legion of Honor Achenbach Foundation and the De Young Museum. Instagram: @thelaurenari

Guest Editor:
Francesca Preston is a writer and visual artist based in Petaluma, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Phoebe, Crab Creek Review, Stonecoast Review, Feral: A Journal of Literature and Art, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, and RHINO. The chapbook If There Are Horns is available from Finishing Line Press, and her microchap This Was Like I Said All Gone is part of Ghost City Press' 2022 Summer Series. Instagram: @francescalouisepreston

Observing Ancient ITALIAN Story Telling Techniques

5/21/2023

The House of Vettii in Pompeii. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto

I visited several museums in Italy - - my partner and I drove through Milan, Pisa, Rome, Napoli, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Orvieto, Firenze, and Venezia - - and observed (overwhelmingly) a lot of historical art and archeological sites.

Human story-telling techniques have not changed much over time. However, it is so cool to witness the progenitors of graphic literature.

So, I temporarily (easily) categorized two types of Italian graphic story telling techniques:

Art without words
Art with one short sentence or a couple of words

1. Art without words

Even though there are no words, audiences will understand a story.

I would like to show you an example from a mural in Pompeii.

Some murals survived in Pompeii and Herculaneum. The two cites were buried under volcanic ashes and pumice stores by Mount Vesuvius (6th–7th century BCE). Herculaneum was recently found, and archeologists have been digging up Pompeii for over three hundred years.

In Pompeii, the House of Vettii, Domus Vettiorum in Latin, was recently unveiled after 20 years of restoration.

I took pictures of some murals about angels' stories. In this, angels perform human tasks - - such as make bronze trinkets, weigh their products, and ride carriages.

The House of Vettii in Pompeii. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto

On each mural, there are main and sub stories. For example, epic Greek stories were told on the main walls, and everyday life sketches were designed on side walls or small spaces.

I loved seeing the ancient comics. Especially on the above murals, where the angels comedically mimic human life. One angel falls from its ride. And all their faces are so unique and cartoonish. The mural is just like the Far Side or Snoopy.

I saw the story-telling style, "Art without words", a lot in early Italian works.

"Pacino di Bonaguida: Tree of Life (1305-10) panel painting" at the Academia Gallery in Firenze. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto

This is another great example of art without words. This is the bottom of Pacino di Bonaguida's panel painting at the Academia Gallery in Firenze.

It is the most popular story of Adam and Eve, the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions. By the 14th century, the story was ubiquitous. Therefore, there is little need for words to explain what is going on.

2. Art with one short sentence or a couple of words

"Annunciation with St. Ansanus and St. Maxima" at the Academia Gallery. Photo by Naoko Fujimoto

From the 14th century art, I started noticing words on paintings.

When I saw this art, I quietly screamed, "This is graphic literature!" And I was so happy to read the descriptions of the art. The curator wrote,

"The Archangel Gabriel's greeting to the Virgin, is engraved on the gold background almost in the manner of a modern cartoon."

Gabriel is on the left and Maria is on the right. Gabriel said, "ave gratia plena dominvs tecvm (Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee)". Between them, there is a lily stem - - symbol of purity (almost cliché for all classical Italian art) - - and look at Maria's face! She is like, "What~ No, thank you."

This is definitely line-break hyper awareness! My idea of l ine-break hyper awareness means that one that guides the reader’s eyes and emotions through poetic lines with static materials.

The golden line starts from the bottom left to top right, which is counter to common human eye reading motions, especially current western graphic narratives.

In addition, why does the spoken line need to support the art? The previous Adam and Eve painting does not have any words. Everyone knows about the Virgin Mary's story, right?

However, the painter decided to add the golden line with an expensive embossing technique. This is an emphasize to reinforce the viewers' dramatic impression. It is so cool to see the origin of line-break hyper awareness.

"Improvise, adapt, invent what you need to" Photographer - Robert Lifson

4/16/2023

Photo Credit: Robert Lifson, Background Photo from the Art Insitute of Chicago

When my poem, "Lake Michigan" (page 50, Wherever I'm At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry), was broadcasted by NPR News: BEZB Chicago, Robert Lifson, a senior photographer in the imaging department at the Chicago Art Insitute, kindly sent me a comment on it.

”...Water is life-giving, a rhythmic heartbeat of waves give life to the land it washes up upon and retreats. Japanese water is its own sacredness and nourishment which I feel feeds even your poem, but it seems that like blood type, there is water type. Lake Michigan is not your water type. You are in need of something it cannot provide.

However, those who scream jellyfish, brought back memories of the beach in Hagi City (that's the voice I understand somewhat). The salt water sea is not like our lake, and I can hear your lament in the poem..." - - Robert Lifson

Through our email conversations, I learned that Lifson was a professional photographer who just finished working with Salvador Dalí's exhibition (until June 12, 2023).

"There are two large security doors I pass through each morning, to enter my studio where the power, mystery and beauty of art is there to greet me. I am grateful every morning." - - Robert Lifson

"Lights, Camera, Reaction: Technical Imaging" - The Art Insitute of Chicago

In recent years, museum photographers and curators find amazing hidden details under advanced lighting technologies using ultraviolet light, infrared light, and transmitted light.

He took a photo of Inventions of the Monsters (1937) in infrared light. This is one of the iconic paintings by Dalí. If you do not know this art, there is a burning giraffe in the top right corner, and human-like creatures on the left side.

Then, if you see this art carefully, there is a dog in the bottom right. With the infrared light, this dog has two adorable eyes. I can gaze at the dog forever! If you visit the website, you are able to grab the arrows in the middle of the slider and compare normal light (slide left) versus UV light (slide right) to experience how Lifson approached and archived historical collections.

He talked more about his process at their museum website.

I create graphic poems, and my absolute nemesis is photographing my own work. I am the worst. I often excuse my lackluster results with, "I don't have a high-quality camera", so my publisher had to hire a photographer for GLYPH.

Actually, I was really happy with the decision of recording my graphic poems with high quality art techniques, something I was never able to achieve before.

I cannot afford that type of luxury. And, you must know - - current cellphones have good cameras and technology, and there are many instructive tutorials - - but nothing encouraged me for a long time.

Now, I decided to ask the photographer who works at one of the most splendid museums in the world how to take great photos with household materials.

Robert Lifson: Photo-graphy, however it's done, follows its name. Light is first and essential to understand in order to produce the image, the desired effects, that one wants to capture.

The better the camera, the more resolution or features, but three techniques I'd point out are lighting configurations, and a fourth, camera positions.

First, assuming that the setup is lighting from the left and right sides and the camera above in the middle of the art work, turn off one side of lights and see how the raking light brings out features of the work.

Naoko Fujimoto: I followed this instruction. But this is a bad example. Do you know why?

Second, with this in mind, use the opposite set of lights either evenly or ratio lighting, so the raking effect is less harsh, more pleasant and still bringing out features or highlights of the work.

Another option is to use one set of lights and a white bounce card opposite. Even lighting can often mute the final capture.

Third, if the use of white walls or large bounce cards is possible, indirect light, diffuse light works well with reflective or gilded material.

Lifson: If you are using household lamps, make sure to have the same bulb in each lamp, so as to not mix warm and cool light, and take off the lamp shade, as it will affect the color of light and be less even.

But experimentation is always helpful.

A reminder: orient the top of the work in the direction of one side of the lighting when using ratio lighting. For relief or layered artwork, be mindful of shadows and rotate the work in your lighting setup to see what is most pleasant to the eye.

For camera use, it is especially helpful to use software that can stitch individual detail captures into a whole or realign distorted captures, which allows for the camera to be more versatile. Shooting off-center, or the camera angled a bit can avoid glare and specular highlights and then corrected in the software.

Fujimoto: I know it is not perfect, but I found a significant difference.

Lifson: There are hard and fast rules to photographing artwork but as you begin, with the setup you have, you can use the above instructions as a guide, then improvise, adapt, invent what you need to in order to see your work photographed in the best light possible.

For camera use, it is especially helpful to use software that can stitch individual detail captures into a whole or realign distorted captures, which allows for the camera to be more versatile. Shooting off-center, or the camera angled a bit can avoid glare and specular highlights and then corrected in the software.

Robert Lifson is an artist, photographer, involved in cultural heritage imaging with the Art Institute of Chicago for many years, he has been able to observe those whose preserve the past and those who create new a present; the process of destruction and creation that is the heartbeat of human existence.

INFINITE DEMAND : Guest Editor - Lúcia Leão / Brazilian Artist - Marcelo Sahea

3/19/2023

I am so excited to introduce Lúcia Leão's second curation. Her previous article was with Angela Quinto. In this article, Leão chose visual poetry projects by a Brazilian artist/poet, Marcelo Sahea, along with a Brazilian poet, Dirceu Villa.

INTRODUCING MARCELLO SAHEA

Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor

"Linguagene" (2022) gel, marker, graphite, fabric marker, and dermatograph pencil on unbleached cotton 70 x 70cm Marcelo Sahea

When Naoko Fujimoto invited me to select guests to her gallery, I thought of Brazilian artists and replicated Fujimoto’s gesture.

I invited Dirceu Villa, a Brazilian poet who lives in São Paulo, to be part of the project. He helped me find and contact visual poets in Brazil. Marcelo Sahea is the second artist. The three of us are introducing to you in this vibrant collective space that Fujimoto’s Working on Gallery opens to us.

Poet, essayist, translator, performer, composer, visual and sound artist, Marcello Sahea was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. He has published four books: Carne Viva, Leve, Nada a Dizer, and Objeto Intersemiótico, and the albums Pletórax and Preparando Meu Próximo Erro. He works with video art, and has participated in digital art shows, exhibitions of sound poetry, visual poetry, and video poetry in Brazil and in several countries. Marcello has performed his work in Brazil, Mexico, and Spain.

Dirceu Villa (1975) is a Brazilian author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is ciência nova (2022). His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Rattapallax (USA), Alforja (Mexico), alba Londres (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France) and Atelier (Italy). He has translated Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Mairéad Byrne, and Jean Cocteau into Portuguese.

INFINITE DEMAND

Essay by Marcelo Sahea

"Moby Dick – chapter 1" (2021) Nanquim (indian Ink) and marker over Canson 15 x 21cm Marcelo Sahea

Ana Hatherly used to say: What distinguishes an individual is the singularity of voice, even on the sacred level. Immersed in uncertainties, I say this image−of a distinction−is not limited only to speech, to the tongue, or even to the oral cavity.

The movements hands and feet make in their errant paths, their exuberance, the economic strokes full of tension, reluctant, nimble, temporary, or surreptitious emulate this orality of mine on the surface of a support, be it a sheet of paper, a white canvas or the space that surrounds me. “Making” is the only possibility, and this axiom continually resonates in my creative process in the attempt at condensing errors into calligraphy.

"raiva/beleza" (2022) – “anger/beauty” acrylic paint, gel, glue, salt, and sawdust on paper 29,7 x 42cm Marcelo Sahea

In one of the essays in my book Objeto Intersemiótico - escritos sobre poesia expandida [Intersemiotic Object – Texts about Expanded Poetry, not available in English], I say that to err is to walk, not to wander aimlessly, but to wander not at random (In Portuguese, the expression for “at random” is “a esmo,” and the verb “esmar”, from Latin “aestimare,” means “to judge, calculate.”)

At times, the unexpected (the novelty, the new) reveals itself in my work in an asymmetrical weaving imposed by the laborious repetition of verses, sentences, neologisms, vocabulary fragmentation, etc. Sometimes, materials and tools affect each other, through fortuitous textures, accidental collages, created by the attempt at blurring the limits of coherence or only the variability of procedures.

"The Death of Metaphor" (2022) acrylic, spray, gel, marker, and dermatograph pencil on unbleached cotton 70 x 70 cm Marcelo Sahea

I see my conversation with visual arts as a corollary of my work with the word. The word is the foundation of my work. I started to make poetry professionally when I was 15, combining verses, painting, and drawing. With the advent of the internet, I migrated to what has conventionally been called “digital poetry”—poetry made with the computer—and that is where I have stayed for at least 20 years. Today I revisit the guiding principles for my work in a circular process, practicing what I now also consider “digital poetry,” but one made with my fingers, with my own digits, my own fingerprints.

Repetition and chance are substantial concepts that permeate the way I have been inhabiting the condition of a poet, since I was nine years old. Perhaps today, with these works, I am looking for another condition, one that leads me to unknown or untraveled paths. After all, as René Char said, “Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones.”

Porto Alegre - RS
Brazil / March 2023

"parto/porta" (2003-2022) – “childbirth/door” dermatograph pencil, Nanquim (indian Ink), and acrylic paste on paper 29,7 x 42 cm - [“parto” also means “I leave”] Marcelo Sahea

Essay by Dirceu Villa

Marcello Sahea is one of the very few in Brazil who are developing a work that is both poetry and visual arts, and a work that becomes increasingly complex. He is constantly incorporating new layers to his practice. In the beginning, Brazilian concrete poetry was a fundamental reference, but now Marcello’s art has become so unique that it would be difficult to establish its driving forces without tracing a huge map of connections between word, image, and sound.

In its graphic inventiveness, one could see Edgard Braga (1897-1985) as a magnetic part of that field, but also, in its vortex, we would definitely find Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988): the mixture of a raw, fierce take on the materials gets combined with the sophistication of its language, its ductile fluidity, and an almost infinite variation of possibilities.

"ostra/astro" (2022) - “oyster/star” dermatograph pencil, Nanquim (indian Ink), gel, and bitumen on paper 29,7 x 42cm Marcelo Sahea

Marcello’s remarkable material approach to the making of such poetry that is visual arts is not his only strong suit: his vocal performance is as complex as his usage of the image, tending to a musical creation that borrows instrumental interventions from percussion and digital soundscapes and takes them to a vivid operation inside the words themselves. The same can be said of his awareness of design and patterning.

The polysemic nature of his distortions of words has, admittedly, a source in James Joyce (1882-1941), and, in this sense, it can evoke numerous meanings by tweaking two or more words into a new fertile one. In the works presented here, the verbovisual entanglement is at full display, but it is also interesting to keep in mind all his wonderful, singular ways of making (here a very precise word) poetry.

Marcello Sahea’s salt, sand, and sawdust are spread out and glued in ways that can help the reader become the poet−get closer, squint their eyes, and notice the texture. The work with illegibility and small letters is part of this move to promote interaction and engagement.

Besides being a poet and visual artist, Marcello is also a body therapist. “The body is a hiding place. The body hides me.” After experimenting with feet calligraffiti and noticing his feet were learning to write, he went back to using his hands for the pieces with calligraphy. Marcello wants the unlearning, to be surprised by what he creates. With the distortion of a single letter a new body is visually born.

He defines himself as a follower of Joan Brossa, the Catalan poet and graphic artist. Many of his works are homages to Brossa.

In his art, Marcello often plays with shadows, with visual echoes of the lines that compose words and sentences. In some of his pieces, there are spaces between words big enough to allow the significance of letters to be stretched out from their usual arrangement. There are extensions and breaks in the images. A new time for fruition is produced.

Marcello can be described as a man of few words if we consider part of his work presented here. Or of many, if we also consider his poetry performed and sung into magic through verbal rituals of repetition, and repetition, and expansion. (Some of his performances can be found here)

Growing up, Marcello had the presence of the word-sound, of music, very near. His father was a songwriter and a poet who collected vinyl records. It was through him that Marcello came to know Caetano Veloso’s album “Araçá Azul,” which awakened in him the desire to explore more deeply the experimental nature of words, of the word performed.

This continuous research is taking him back now, again, to his own body as an instrument.

Guest Editors:
Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, and elsewhere. It is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia holds a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UERJ–RJ, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism (University of Miami–FL, USA). She is a book reviewer for RHINO literary magazine, a volunteer copyeditor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a board member for TCLA, a non-profit organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has been living in South Florida for 30 years.

The Enri-an Temple in Kyoto

2/19/2023

I visited a house where the Ogura waka-poetry anthology was selected in the 12th century.

The Enri-an Temple (厭離庵) is located in the Arashiyama area of western Kyoto. Thanks to my mother who had the guts to look for it, while I was giving up.

We got lost in an isolated bamboo field looking for this hidden house. There was nothing around us (and it was super cold), and one local man passing through with a truck full of traditional Japanese gardening tools even asked, "Do you really want to visit there?"

My mother and I finally visited and spiritually said "hello" to two incredible poets, Rensyō and Fujiwara no Sadaie.

In my translation workshop, I often mention that the original waka poems were written on thick paper for dividers, sliding doors, and windows.

Rensyō asked Fujiwara no Sadaie to decorate his house, which is the origin of the anthology. This is not the original house, but there are definitely remnants of antient spirits here.

I was so thrilled to actually orient myself and breath in the atmosphere around!

I have been translating waka poems from the Japanese anthology Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ( 小倉百人一首 ), which is more simply referred to as Hyakuninisshu , meaning One Hundred Poets, One Waka Poem Each. It is a work of great literary-historical significance, and remains one of the most widely read and translated Japanese texts today.

More about Hyakun Isshu Process:

Uncomics - Allan Haverholm

1/15/2023

Art by Allan Haverholm, from "When the last story is told" (2015)

I have been curating RHINO Poetry's *graphic* book reviews. This is a big annual celebration for RHINO and many people are looking forward to "reading" the reviews.

In case you do not know about our graphic reviews, our contributors introduce and review books with words & images. They are not traditional book reviews because our readers have to participate by analyzing images along with reading the written portions.

Through the years, some graphic reviews took on qualities of contemporary art - - less words - - therefore, I ask my contributors to write a short essay along with their art interpretation because RHINO Poetry publishes book reviews. Book reviews aim to have clear messaging to properly portray books to potential audiences.

Allan Haverholm saw Tana Oshima's graphic review and introduced RHINO *graphic* Reviews in a British podcast, Comics for the Apocalypse. Oshima recommended it to me, and I eventually started communicating with Haverholm. He studies and writes about various concepts of uncomics in Sweden.

Those are four things those uncomics want: To not be figurative, but also to sing, dance, and to jump hurdles, all made possible by the subversive maneuver of declining sociocultural perceptions, and of conjugating linear narrative into labyrinths or rhizomic networks. They want to be uncomics.

Read more... -- Lund University, Allan Haverholm

Uncomics is new to me, so I decided to ask Haverholm three questions.

After I learned about uncomics, I had the fantastic idea to have book reviews without words. I am considering what different curators aim to achieve with their platforms, and am excited to explore this idea.

Art by Allan Haverholm, from "Time & memory" (2020)

What are uncomics?

Uncomics are works that use visual language and structures from other art forms to expand upon the field of comics — or modern and contemporary art that employs comics characteristics. But "uncomics" covers both the artistic practice and the research into the works. The term came from the need to theorise that growing, experimental periphery without getting bogged down by, say, superhero or graphic novel discourse — and the name is a nod to the fact that most readers of traditional comics will look at these works and say "Yeah, but those aren't comics".

So, in one sentence? " Uncomics is an artistic and research field where traditional comics end but formal characteristics of comics intersect with the wider arts"

Uncomics – an artistic field where contemporary art and comics inform each other.

Where the absence of sequence encourages the reader to investigate the picture plane(s) in any direction and order, becoming an active co-creator in the process.

A space outside the tedious limitations of story, where images both abstract and suggestive interact.

- - The Uncomics anthology edited by Allan Haverholm

more examples of uncomics

Give two examples of uncomics and explain what makes them that.

I'll give you a comics example and one from 20th Century art.

Example One:
"Spider" by Gareth A Hopkins, 2021

read Hopkins' uncomics

Gareth is an abstract artist who works mainly in comics. Because the visuals of his work leans toward abstract art, only the text implies a conventional reading direction. Yet the page layout gives the work away as a comic, and it was anthologised along with more traditional, figurative comic works. It is the ambiguous meaning and directionality of the visuals that make this an uncomic, because it opens the work up to interpretation and analysis outside the comics theory toolbox. And in that interpretive process of decoding and navigating the pages, the reader takes on a co-creative, puzzle solving role that goes beyond pure reading or viewing.

Example Two:
"Untitled (triptych)" by Joan Mitchell, 1971-3

"Untitled (triptych)" by Joan Mitchell, 1971-3

In many ways, the triptych (and other multi-paneled artworks) is structurally comparable to newspaper comic strips. However, in visual arts the triptych is a multiplication of canvases, whereas the comic strip is a condensation, like a haiku form compared to comic books and graphic novels. Joan Mitchell did several multipanel works, but in this one she adds an extra dimension by composing each panel from roughly rectangular colour surfaces, not unlike Gareth Hopkins' page layouts. In an uncomics perspective, she turns the basic comic strip structure into a metatextual space where each comics panel is itself more like a comics page consisting of several subdivisions, or metapanels.

On a side note, both of these examples are painted but because the field of uncomics casts a wide net, an art installation or sculpture might also be considered an uncomic.

What is the Uncomics podcast, who are the guests and what are the subjects?

uncomics Available episodes

I have called the Uncomics podcast an "online symposium" into the field of uncomics. For the first season I recorded and published a dozen artist talks with some of the leading artists in the field, such as Gareth A Hopkins, Rosaire Appel, Warren Craghead and Aidan Koch, to give a cross section of the wider practice. With each I talk about their oeuvre and vision, and try to contextualise it in terms of other, contemporary art forms — including of course comics.

The next season will shift its focus toward scholars and theorists that work within fields I have found adjacent to the works and artists from season one. I am attempting to build a framework that will bridge art history and comics theory — or that is my thesis at least, I'm still only preparing talks for the second season.

Photo by Zenia Johnsen

Allan Haverholm is a graphic artist, independent artistic researcher, editor, curator and performer. His experimental comics practice has been exhibited across Europe and North America, and he has given talks, courses and workshops across Northern Europe. Since his 2015 abstract comic "When the last story is told", he has formulated the field of uncomics to describe and study similar multidisciplinary practices in comics and contemporary arts

Happy Holidays!

12/16/2022

Gifts from Francesca Preston

Working on Gallery does not have a new article this December; however, there is so much content you may enjoy reading and experiencing.

Working On Gallery Past Guest Lists

Something is Going On
This is a new blog where I showcase interviews and reviews outside Working on Gallery.

Graphic Poetry Study Guide

Site Map of Study Guides

WG Instagram

I renamed my website to FUJI HUB in hopes that this website becomes a way station where people come and find other outlets. There are many articles and writers' & artists' website links. Working On Gallery is one of the projects.

Please explore!

"Almost a Poem": Guest Editor - Lúcia Leão / Brazilian Artist - Angela Quinto

11/16/2022

I am so excited to introduce Lúcia Leão as a guest editor. I met her when I stayed at the Betsy Hotel by SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) residency programs.

Leão is originally from Brazil, and she occasionally travels between Miami and Chicago. When she is around, we visit the Art Institute of Chicago and talk about poetry, translation, and art.

In this article, Leão curated visual poetry projects by a Brazilian artist/poet, Angela Quinto, along with a Brazilian poet, Dirceu Villa.

---
NOTE:
The majority of this interview and details are originally written in Portuguese. Leão translated them into English.

Instagram Post in Portuguese

Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor

INTRODUCING ANGELA QUINTO
Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor

When Naoko Fujimoto invited me to invite guests to her gallery, I thought of Brazilian artists and replicated Fujimoto’s gesture. I invited Dirceu Villa, a Brazilian poet who lives in São Paulo, to be part of the project. He helped me find and contact visual poets in Brazil.

Angela Quinto is the first artist. The three of us are introducing to you in this vibrant collective space that Fujimoto’s Working on Gallery opens to us.

Angela Quinto once said if she could be an animal, she would be a buffalo−or a termite, because of the kind of writing termites make, “so kindergartenish.” This is a compliment to termites, since for Angela, writing her presence in the world has been an act−many acts−of freeing interventions that go deep into the matter of composition.

This Brazilian artist who lives in São Paulo is a poet, performer, weaver, and therapist. She was also a clown, part of a group called “Little Company of Mysteries and Nonsense,” with two other women.

“Termites” is the title of her series Cupins. These insects entered her poetic perception more vividly when she had to take care of the furniture she inherited from her father’s printing business. Family history is also present in “Anyletters” (Quaisquercartas), in which she used the letters exchanged by her parents during their engagement period (1950-1952) to create a space for what she calls instanternity.

Angela’s brother was a typographer, and a visit to a printing press in São Paulo a few months after his death inspired her work “I lost my tongue abroad” (Perdi minha língua no estrangeiro).

“It was like walking backward...

until I got to undecidable strokes. (…) Gestures of a small desire for delirium, with no thought at all, toward a body with the bone of the word−the letter.”

- - Angela Quinto

In August 2022, she launched Fosse porque fosse (For Whatever Reason), “almost a poem, a hybrid text with an undefined territory” crossed by her “body-language,” after she experienced the kidnapping (her word) of a sibipiruna, a tree native to Brazil, across from her house.

It is with the work of decomposition, the repetition of impressions, and of movable types that Angela engages her whole body. Using the fragmentation of her own work, she breaks unity−time and again−also with her voice. A friend who listened to her performance “ver o poema desmontado” (“see the poem disassembled,” link below) said her cat ran to the sliding door, probably thinking it had heard a bird sing.

Angela’s work and her performances file the edges of circularity, of time, of types.

Dirceu Villa[1] introduced Angela Quinto (1955 - current). Villa wrote that Quinto is composing a body of work (and, in this case, “body” is a very precise word) in Brazil that ranges from poetry to the visual arts, performance and ritual. Her amazingly inventive mechanism combines important references in Brazilian art, of such artists as Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1909-1989) and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), among many others. But her dynamic is unique in creating objects meticulously crafted with a deep knowledge of the graphic arts, with the manipulation of the object trouvé (breathing life into them when operating their transformation into figures of speech), with apt knitting of symbolic patterns, charged with meaning, allusive to the work of the ancient fiandeiras, composing talismans that become part of performances reenacting lost rituals. She also naturally brings together the three great ethnic origins of Brazil: Indigenous, African, and European (particularly, Portuguese).

But this is only a part of her multiple visual and performative repertoire, which is also a part of her poetic writing. The word is as fundamental to her art as it was for the great Catalan master Joan Brossa (1919-1998). It is not a coincidence that both were fascinated by the circus, and have experimented with its unusual trickery, its distorted mirror-image of the world as a way into the deep recesses of the human experience.

Angela Quinto writes poems that carry with them an amalgam of Brazilian traditions down to its linguistic labyrinth: she joins the modernist experiments of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) in a book like Macunaíma (1928), and Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967), who would forge a new language based on Brazilian Portuguese, blending different etymologic, polyglot sources into a speech that would depict with inventiveness the way Brazilian sertanejos speak. Quinto doesn’t make polyglot reinventions of language as Rosa does: her particular way of writing is aware of a wide range of Brazilian speeches and their use, combining the Afro-Brazilian tradition of the candomblé, its rhythms, the chants of the Guarani people and a very keen knowledge of Brazilian and Portuguese traditions of poetry and song.

---
[1] Dirceu Villa (1975) is a Brazilian author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is ciência nova (2022). His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Rattapallax (USA), Alforja (Mexico), alba Londres (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France) and Atelier (Italy). He has translated Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Mairéad Byrne, and Jean Cocteau into Portuguese.

Photos by Angela Quinto

Cupins
Termites - Angela Quinto
Interviewed and Translated by Lúcia Leão

3.100 known species, less than 10% are pests, bioindicators of ecosystem health, they contribute to water retention, porosity and aeration of the soil, help in the carbon-hydrogen balance, are a source of protein and resources for the production of medicines, feed on cellulose, wood, grasses, herbaceous plants, nocturnal creatures almost blind, they act almost in secret, térmita, siriri, sililuia, ririruia, aleluia, arará, salalé, muchém, itapicuim, kupi’i. Termites are super decomposers. The traces they leave in decomposition suggest a writing. Considering that animals don't need to enter language, because they are already in it; the one that sensorially opens up to its cracks and that, without limitations, enters into a state of astonishment, opens new paths of knowledge. A writing analogous to the corporeal system, like the kindergarten language in children's drawings, like the footprints of birds on the sand, or even in Chinese ideograms. Consonance between text and image, language as a kind of algebra, an ancient voice, a powerful sound heard from silent creatures.

Plaquette

Poetry Performance by Angela Quinto in Portuguese

WATCH

Cartasquaisquer
Anyletters - Angela Quinto
Interviewed and Translated by Lúcia Leão

My work seeks to contact experiences of life&death&life. It is an answer, in language, to loss, and although it uses art as an expanded field, it is poetry that gives it all its movements, and light.

Cartasquaisquer (Anyletters) is a series of interventions in the letters that my parents exchanged from 1950 to 1952, which I received after they died. After a while, this familiar universe crossed another. During a walking trip through the Brazilian backlands, I started a poetic barter experience with someone in prison, a political prisoner* − In order to open words, to open paths, gestures that make worlds move.

The creative process started with the most archaic manual aspect, the weaving of the original letters; weaving an answer of my own, bringing temporalities disconnected of meaning closer, and making the non-semantic writing appear where words escape−one of the characteristics of this series. From the raw materiality, I traveled to virtual experiments: enlarging, reducing, and photocopying copies. Now the whole body is caught in the interventions and in the territory where erasure and chance court the imperceptible. A new dimension emerges, the failure of language.

From material to virtual, from virtual to failure, from failure to the non-word, from emptiness to concreteness, the word-thing is the hot core of the experience.

yearnings Woven original letters 0.74 cm x 0.44 cm

uni verses Envelopes woven in copper wire over mirror 0.41 cm x 0.49 cm

I don't know how else to say it Human hair pressed onto merino wool 0.42 cm x 0.68 cm

quelêquelê: ponto feito Installation - mixed technique (side view) Four panels, 1.0 m x 1.5 m

To walk on letters and different grounds, to have in the needle, thread, and dye the basis for a transcultural worldview, to compose and wear a cloak to celebrate the encounter with another in diversity is to give words a new tactile-sounding body, is to allow modulations to thoughts, and so perhaps this word-body will come to occupy the place of instanternity.

*Jorge Augusto Xavier de Almeida, leader of grassroots movements, Black, poor, and from the Northeast region of Brazil, was in prison from 2016 to 2021. No evidence against him was presented.

Poetry Performance by Angela Quinto in Portuguese

watch

OriOyá Buffalo horn and printed silk strips 0.37 cm x 1.5 m Used also as a costume for a performance

Perdi minha língua no estrangeiro
I lost my tongue abroad
Translated by Lúcia Leão

[1] “Ori” means “head” in Yoruba and “Oyá” is an Orisha, also known as Yansã. The silk strips have excerpts of the letters Angela’s mother, Irene, sent to Angela’s father. Angela is a daughter of Yansã, and here she mixes her biological mother and the Orisha.

[2] cassofracasso – A play with sounds and meanings, mixing words such as “casso,” first-person present-tense of the verb “cassar” (to repeal, revoke) and “fracasso,” failure. The word “caço” that we also hear here, means “I hunt.”

[3] Fogueiralta is a combination of two words, “fogueira” and “alta” – “bonfire” and “high.” Angela wrote this poem after she heard Camila, the daughter of Jorge Augusto Xavier de Almeida read her father’s letters, during Angela’s trip through the Brazilian backlands. Angela would later exchange letters with Jorge for five years.

[4] quelêquelê: ponto feito – “Quelêquelê” is a word Angela created.”Ponto feito” is a “ebó,” an offering to a spiritual being.

[5] Reerence to a song “Vela no Breu,” by Paulinho da Viola, a Brazilian guitarist, composer, and singer.

words-fish Raffia in copper wire over mirror 0.64 cm x 0.68 cm

Guest Editor:

Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, and elsewhere. It is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia holds a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UERJ–RJ, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism (University of Miami–FL, USA). She is a book reviewer for RHINO literary magazine, a volunteer copyeditor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a board member for TCLA, a non-profit organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has been living in South Florida for 30 years.

Three Questions to Dennis Avelar

10/15/2022

English & Spanish Editions

I met a Chicago author with Guatemalan roots, Dennis Avelar, at the 51st Ward Books Festival, where celebrated multi-cultural and linguistical books for young readers.

"The Blue Q" was a fiction novel for young adults, though Avelar's cinematic story-telling made it enjoyable for all adults. The main character was a young boy who became a spiritual animal - - you'll know what I mean if you read this book - - wink, wink. I think that Avelar has two strengths: ONE, The ability to create highly detailed narratives (his film background may contribute to this); TWO, Great support on his book tours (from his family and friends).

I met his family at the book festival. They were indeed supportive, gathering audiences and talking about "The Blue Q" and Guatemalan culture & history. Many writers may be shy when selling books themselves, but family support is very reassuring when close people excel at it.

Recently, I went to Beth McDermott, "Figure 1" book release party. Her mother ordered cookies that were frosted with the cover of her book. Those little things were real encouraging to the writers present.

Takashi Murakami, a Japanese contemporary artist, once said that writers & artists must sell their products to their parents & family first. If your family is convinced of your projects and purchase your works, your art is real.

"I don’t know of anyone in the traditional publishing industry. I have no contacts, I know no agents, and I have no idea how to go from completed story to New York Times bestseller – but that doesn’t mean I will not do everything in my power to at least try." - - Dennis Avelar

Here are three questions about Dennis Avelar's creative processes!

Dennis Avelar

How did your family support your creative process?

My family has never stopped supporting my creative process, though I have been challenged in many ways by them. Prior to writing “The Blue Q”, I studied and graduated with honors from Columbia College Chicago’s film and video program. Here I learned the fine art of filmmaking, which is a massive undertaking regardless of the scope of any project.

Regardless of how thoughtfully diverse or just plain weird my ideas were, members of my family were eager to help me. My mother has always been my greatest fan, and my brothers have contributed wherever possible. My nieces and nephews have many times been my key actors and actresses. Even when I was working in a creative field on my own, I was fortunate in that I could lean on them for help when needed.

In terms of being an author, my first presentation in Guatemala (for a book with a Guatemalan theme and protagonist) was done in front of my extended family, and they happily and proudly purchased copies of the book and asked for them to be signed and dedicated. My family in Guatemala helps me tremendously, and they continue to do so even when my requests are above-and-beyond. There are some members of my family who refuse to miss a single one of my presentations, and even if they are the only ones in the room for the presentation, it makes me smile to know they are there for me. That’s a dedication and commitment that has no value, yet means more to me than I can express through words.

I can tell you a short story that recently occurred to me, which caught me by complete surprise. My nephew is currently a sophomore in high school, though he was a notoriously distracted child – very intelligent, but when he was younger his mind would travel to faraway lands while his teacher tried to get him to focus on something like spelling.

He has always been a fun-loving kid, but now as he has grown older, his priorities have shifted. One of the ways in which he is more social is by talking more to others, and in a complete, uncommon characteristic, he is now even talking to girls his age. I have yet to confirm whether or not he is interested in a particular ‘friend’, but we’ll see what happens. I learned just yesterday that he asked and took this young woman as his date to homecoming over the weekend.

Anyway, the friend that he may-or-may-not-have-a-crush-on had a birthday not too long ago. Now, having huge selection of options from which to choose for him to gift this young lady, my nephew choose to give her a copy of my novel. What’s more, he did not want it donated, but rather he used his own money to pay for a copy. I was shocked; not by the action, but by the gesture. The best gift a shy young man chose to give to his young crush for her birthday was a copy of his uncle’s novel, my novel! That is a compliment worth far more to me than any star-rating on any online network.

How did you find time to write such a long novel with your full-time job?

It comes down to one word: perseverance. After some time, it became more about the story I wanted it to be than about the number of words or pages that were typed. But there is much more to it than just sitting down in front of my laptop and adding words to a blank document.

The journey of “The Blue Q” began when I was approximately 9 years old. I vaguely remember the summer of 1992 as that was the year the Olympics were in Barcelona, Spain, and the first time professional basketball players were allowed to participate (being from Chicago, my family and I were BIG fans of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Chicago Bulls). My family and I were in Guatemala at the time, so while I do not recall watching the events like we may have done back in Chicago, I do look back on that trip as the first I can recall of my visits to Guatemala.

What I most remember is visiting a small town named Esquintla – which is approximately halfway between Guatemala City and the city of Mazatenango (where most of my family lives) – where we had ice cream under a large tree. My mother explained to me that the tree under which we found shade was actually a ceiba tree, which is the national tree of Guatemala, and that it was unique because of its roots, it’s bark, and the formation of its branches. I did not think much of it at the time, but I recall that tree in the town square.

The only other aspect I recall about that trip to Guatemala was an interesting rock formation along the side of a busy, 2-lane road. It was a creation of art made of a few very large stones, slightly carved and then painted to look like a bird known as a quetzal. Now, I vaguely remember an uncle of mine pulling over the car and stopping briefly on the side of this narrow road to explain the quetzal to us.

He explained that the quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and that it is a symbol of our people. I remember the impression that rock formation made on me, and despite it being noting more than a few painted stones - it was not nearly as massive in scale as Mount Rushmore or any number of rock carvings that are so prominent in the United States – the fact that this bird was important enough to be represented in this manner made a great impression on me.

Mi Quetzal Restaurant/JIREH GT Bakery in Bensenville, Illinois

Time went on, years passed, and though I vaguely (though fondly) remembered that trip, new priorities came to light. Chicago continued to provide endless stories, but none were so prominent in my life than the (mis)adventures of my brother’s activities. He seemed to always find a way to get himself in trouble (or methods in which to get himself out of it), but no matter what he gave me the foundation for storytelling. One day, for reasons I have yet to understand, I took pen to paper and wrote a story about him. The short story became my very first, “My Big Brother”, which today is the standard by which I create my artistic universe; not because of its success nor its global appeal, but because it taught me about the power of the written word.

“My Big Brother” was not published, was not entered in any competition nor was it memorable to anyone outside of my family. But to me, it became the foundation of what I wanted my future stories to become. At the age of twelve I learned that my father – a man who worked hard to provide for his family, even though doing so meant working the 2nd shift at a factory and missing a great portion of his children’s activities – took a copy of “My Big Brother” to work with him and would read it on particularly difficult days.

The story would immediately change his outlook on work, and while it did not solve the problem (or lessen the work-related stressors), it enabled him briefly escape and find joy among a place of tension and pressure. The standard of my stories thus became to have a similar impact; to use words in a way in which people can escape, where readers can discover laughter or joy or drama, and be transported somewhere else entirely if even for a moment. It was at that age in which I told myself and my mother that I would one day write a book, even though I did not have the slightest idea of how to do it.

But of course, at the age of twelve, the term “some day” could just as easily be a few weeks as much as it could be a few months. For me, that statement lasted two and a half decades.

Twenty five years later, I had nothing but an extensive list of excuses as to why I had not achieved my goals – personally or professionally – and I found myself at the intersection of perhaps the darkest crossroad I hope to ever face in my life. I had lost myself along the trail of excuses, and I had little more than a long list of failures, experiences, and a few minor successes for which to draw upon. It was my mother who then reminded me of the promise I had made to her and to myself, and the process began as a subtle attempt to silence the voices that lingered austerely in my mind.

But the challenge was not merely a creative one. I was forced to challenge every part of my being in every possible way. In order to help clear my mind, I first needed to clear my body of years of laziness. I began to walk – first just around the block, then at a nearby trail – which later became longer and longer distances. The days grew colder and shorter, though my running distances became longer. In the fall of 2018, I thought it would be highly unlikely that I would be accepted to participate in the 2019 Chicago Marathon, yet I chose to submit an application. As fate and luck would have it, I was selected as a participant, and so rigorous training became a part of my daily routine.

Having my body burn thousands of calories on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis was by no means a simple task, though I found that my creativity flowed like a strong river as I ran on the woodland trails, or along bike paths, or anywhere I found it to be safe enough to run. Ice formed on the sides of my shoes, and while I was pushing the limits of my physicality, my mind thought of nothing but highly imaginative scenes of a story I was yet to draft. My body was exhausted, though my mind felt liberated, and I had yet one part of me that remained to be addressed.

In an effort to not decline a sincere request from my sister, I attended a service at her church. I listened and felt something within me that needed to be reconnected to a greater source, and I found a passion that I thought had long since abandoned me. I found a purpose beyond hope, and despite my heavy training routine, I knew I did not want this to end. I expressed my gratitude for my life while on the elliptical. I found the joy of nature while running hundreds of miles back and forth along the Great Western Trail near my home. I discovered that I had yet to fulfill the promise I made to myself such a long time ago, and I had run out of reasons not to.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the entire process was getting started. Even after I had fully committed and decided to begin writing a story, any story, I had brought forth a list of reasons and excuses why it would not be done.

Page one began as an attempt, but I had made it a strong point that this would only be a short story with no more than 10 pages and certainly not any chapters. Ten pages later, I found it to be exhilarating and liberating, but remained skeptical that it would become anything greater. I worked the courage to give myself more time and pages, resetting the limit from 10 to 25. I got to page 30, and learned more about the process than I ever knew to be possible. The new limit was re-reset from 25 pages to 50 pages, but that was the absolute maximum I would allow!

I landed somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 pages before I realized how far the story had gone, and I had absolutely no intention of ending the progress I had made after weeks of writing. I loved the process so much, and each day brought forth new scenes and challenges that came to life with the magic of the written word. My daily schedule became as follows:

Wake up at 4:50am, get ready and pack for work.
Get to the gym (at work) by around 6:30am. Training from that time until 8:30am.
Be at my desk by 9:00am. Perform all assigned duties until 5:00pm
At 5:00pm, go to the upstairs cafeteria (again, at the office) and write until 9:00pm. *Note*; on some days this went far later. I recall one time leaving the office at 1:00am on an early Saturday morning, after I could not leave until I had finished a particular scene.
Get home at around 10:00pm. Small dinner (mostly children’s cereals).
Read a non-fictional book until 11:30pm or until I was unable to stay awake.

I stayed true to this same daily routine, minus a few changes on the weekends, for 10 months. I say this not to boast about my accomplishments, but rather to express what it took in order to transform 25 years of negating my own passion to produce something that would outlive me.

I did not want to create just a story, but rather a memorable mission that would encapsulate the very core of my being and that could be used to create a positive impact for readers around the world. And so for those 10 months, I did not see it as putting myself through hell, but rather as a means of escaping from it. There is a strange correlation between training for a marathon and writing a novel, and I discovered a joy that far outweighs even the darkest, coldest nights I have ever experienced.

I ran the 2019 Chicago Marathon in 4 hours and 24 minutes, and at exactly 400 typed pages, had finished the first draft of what became “The Blue Q: The World As I See It”. Both of these events happened around the same time, which I now see as ironic. Just as I had after completing the first draft of the story, I had one tough question to answer: now what?

The response was to keep going. Surely there would be other marathons, but more importantly, there was a 400-page story to edit. The schedule persisted as best as I could manage, though it was altered in March of 2020 due to the pandemic. Unexpectedly, I hurt my knee as a result of over exerting myself, and while I may have temporarily put away my running shoes, my bike enabled me to greatly over-exceed the difference. I biked just shy of 4,000 miles that summer, and by the end of it, the book was completed.

When I saw and held the book in my hand for the very first time, I became completely overwhelmed. It was an accomplishment that I never thought would see the light of day, and now it had a title, a beautiful cover, a mission, a purpose…and my name at the very top of it. I had to run hundreds of miles for months in order to draft that story. I had to bike thousands of miles in order to edit it. I had to invest countless hours in prayer, self-reflection, meditation, and self-help literature in order to be lifted to the point where I felt that I was worthy of my accomplishments.

For me, I hope the process never ends. Though new challenges may be on the horizon, new chapters for the sequential books are already underway. I have learned to enjoy and appreciate each step as it represents a new word; each mile as it represents a new sentence; each tough training month as it represents a new chapter; and each achieved goal as means the story is further along. Though I may not win the race, I am in a far better place knowing that I at least got up and did my best.

I recall that your English edition was self-published. What are the pros and cons about working through Amazon publishing?

Well, I must start by saying a pro to one may just as easily be a con to someone else. My experience with being a self-published author is not the same as other authors.

I found the Amazon process to be simple to navigate though oftentimes difficult to understand. Unless you know about the business (through school or self-research), it can be very daunting, intimidating, and confusing. Amazon does its best to explain the process to new self-publishers, but it is not as user-friendly as one would hope. Much of what I learned I gained through Google searches and through the kindness of strangers (many of which are on Reddit).

It can be difficult to see your competition and see how success seems to come to so incredibly easy to some authors and writers, while I can go weeks without selling a single copy. That’s part of the game, and you must realize this prior to launching your work under the self-published title. It can also be disheartening to see how big of a percentage Amazon (and other retailers) take from each sale of your work, but that is part of the process.

What I appreciate the most is the complete creative control I am given (via Amazon and other self-publishing networks) over my work. Just as an independent filmmaker has complete creative control over the vision of the film, so too does an independent author over their stories and characters. Amazon does not limit me on page numbers, or story content, or character names, or anything really. As long as I fit the dimensions of the print-size book I want, the rest is relatively simple. I have my own ISBN numbers, I have my own barcodes, I run my own websites, and I have entirely full control.

On the other end of that, however, is that because I am on my own, I am solely responsible for the book’s performance. I have to be an author, a content developer, a web developer, a content writer, a photographer, a videographer, an editor, chief spokesman, legal officer, public relations manager, marketing and communications director, head of operations, accounts payable and receivable, and also the chief financial officer of the entire enterprise – not to mention social media specialist, travel manager, public speaker, and other duties as self-assigned. That might not be worth it to some, but for me, it is the best that I can do – and I truly appreciate all that I am learning because of it.

I don’t know of anyone in the traditional publishing industry. I have no contacts, I know no agents, and I have no idea how to go from completed story to New York Times bestseller – but that doesn’t mean I will not do everything in my power to at least try.

This is not in any way an attempt to discourage self-publishing, but rather a method in which I attempt to paint a more accurate portrait of my experiences. Here is a word of caution for anyone who wants to go it this endeavor solo: there are PLENTY of scammers out there waiting patiently for your money. These are difficult waters to navigate, and even after years of learning, I am nowhere near the level I want to be to say I am an expert at this. But I don’t have time to waste, as my story is not going to tell itself and will not find readers by just sitting in my mailbox or tucked away in a storage closet. If I have the opportunity to work with publishers in the future, I welcome the opportunity to do so, but if not, then at least I know I did my best in putting my work and my name out to the world.

Dennis Avelar’s mission to become a published author began while he was in middle school, where he developed a passion for telling compelling stories. Born and raised in and around the suburbs of Chicago, he drew inspiration from the people, places, events, and experiences he shared with friends and family.

As a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s film and video program, Dennis further developed his passion for storytelling by incorporating elements of cinema into the universes created by his mind.

His lifelong goal remains the same as it was when he first sought to achieve it, and he hopes that the opportunity to help others with his words and writing continues to inspire his future works and stories.

He currently resides in Addison, Illinois. Learn more about the author and view his other creative works at www.DennisAvelar.com.

Happy Late Summer Vacation!

9/15/2022

With Lúcia Leão

Working on Gallery does not have a new article this September; however, there are so many contents that you may enjoy reading and experiencing.

Working On Gallery Past Guest Lists

Something is Going On
This is a new blog where I showcase interviews and reviews outside of Working on Gallery.

Graphic Poetry Study Guide

Site Map of Study Guides

WG Instagram

WG Channel with Angela Narciso Torres

8/1/2022

Watch WG Channel

Angela Narciso Torres reads her newest book, "What Happens Is Neither". I was so happy to catch her before she took off for Los Angeles!

She educates me about poetry. She stands by me when I go through difficult times. She guides me as to what is life. I only met her briefly in Chicago, but I am such a lucky person to have our friendship grow over such distances, sometimes between Manila & Tokyo.

Cheers for our friendship.

WG Channel with Virginia Bell

7/1/2022

Watch WG Channel

Today's guest is Virginia Bell!

She is our RHINO POETRY new leader who made sure that we survived the pandemic & will have more poetic moments with our local & international writers.

When she read two poems at the University of Chicago, tornado warnings started blaring like crazy!! This portrait picture was taken just before the storm. (I love it!) We relocated to a safe area to finish the video recordings.

First Poem:
"Sallie Gardner (1878)", Published in Kettle Blue Review, 2018

Second Poem:
"The Man Who Perfected the Disappearing Thumb Trick", Published in Cider Press Review, 2015

WG Channel with Beth McDermott

6/1/2022

Congratulations, Beth McDermott!

Her first poetry full-length book, "Figure 1", has just come out from Pine Row Press,

AND

- - drumroll, please - -

she is the new editor in chief at Cider Press Review!

Please enjoy watching her reading on Instagram WG Channel.

WG Channel

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