Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Since August 2018, poet Nancy DeJoy and printmaker Samantha Earley have developed a collaborative project in which we explore ways to understand the singular and collective meaning of our lives through integrating poetry and lithography. In our endeavor, we concretize the emotive power of the poetic by connecting sensory words with images that are illustrative or abstract. Then, that poetic and visual artwork becomes a material artistic artifact. Our experiment thus moves poetry into the realm of the image/object and conversely makes the image/object an interpretive body that invites the viewer to experience the relationship between poetry and print in ways that make poetry an object of art and makes image a linguistic artifact. Our work invites viewers to read images and words as multi-faceted interpretations of both the mundane (renting an apartment, fixing a table, contemplating light reflected on a shirt) and the dramatic (birth, death, mass shootings). Our paper uses some of this work to illustrate the ways that this type of collaboration expands the empirical reach of the image and opens a space for accommodating multiple views of similar events across different lives. In this manner, we attempt to forge new paths for artists and viewers to understand our collective lives as individual experiences integrated within larger social communities and mores.