I’m pleased to announce our publication The Heart Is A Drowning Object, an artists book, a collaboration between three women who with their art explore the workings of grief on a woman’s body in the face of possible loss, her descent into profound solitude, her unexpected emergence into joy.
Isabel Pavão is an internationally-known visual artist working in various pictorial and tactile media. Katherine Vaz is a novelist whose work appears in many languages. Together, exchanging versions of poems — sounds into words, words into lines — and paintings — marks on paper, collaged, photographed and printed, then marked again and intensified — they made a dialog of emotion on the skin, echoing in the mind.
Now they asked themselves, can we put poems and pictures together on our computer screen? They made a Power Point. That is where I came in. It was awful! Look, I said. The lines are crowded and smashed against the images, and why did you use Helvetica? Hmm, they said. We didn’t think about it.
Your poems are deeply moving, I said. Your pictures are gorgeous! But you have to think about fonts. Friends, you do have to think about fonts.
I proposed taking their dialog into my own medium, this multi-touch construction for the iPad and Mac. What we’ll have, I explained, is a new version, in a new form, of your dialog. Let me lay out these lines and art. Let’s record your voice, Katherine Vaz. Isabel Pavão, we can let readers explore your images in detail. I’ll make a little video poem.
And so on. Over the last six months we exchanged edits and revisions, until our various elements settled into place on the screen. Here is an intimacy between you and the artists. You can read her poems as you listen to the poet. You can follow the artist’s line deep into the slubs of her canvas. The video poem offers you their voices as if in harmony with your eyes as they move across the canvas of the screen. You and the artists are present to each other. We give our artists book today into your hands.