The Heart Is A Drowning Object is a collaboration in poems and paintings by the novelist Katherine Vaz and the artist Isabel Pavão, who are known to international audiences.
These artists have found inspiration in a female solitude that living through grief might bring. Katherine Vaz’s melodic poems begin with an actual damaged heart in a love story—a husband with a sudden affliction, a wife who tends to him. Isabel Pavão’s vibrant pictures share and explore her colorations of grief. Their words and images grow together, in an unexpected bloom of joy, into a way of recognizing late love amid the real possibility of loss.
Artist’s Proof Editions offers their collaboration as a multi-touch artist’s book. The reader may enlarge and examine the painter’s multi-media art in detail. She may listen to the writer’s voice while reading her poems. In the opening video poem, the poet and the artist, performing together, become twinned with glorious imagery, in their evocation of longing and reunion.
A multi-media, multi-touch book, with galleries and video poem.
Available for the iPad and Mac on Apple Books.
We now offer two artist’s prints from the studio of Isabel Pavão and two hand-printed broadsides, available in our new shop.
“Seldom does one read pages of such intense beauty and intelligence about the female heart as those written by Vaz.” —Simonetta Bartolini for Il Giornale (Italy), about the novel Mariana, published in six languages and selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998
“Katherine Vaz is the sort of fiction writer who makes me wonder why the rest of us even bother…. Her work has a delicious sadness to it that I couldn’t quite define until I visited Lisbon. The Portuguese have this emotion they call ‘saudade,’ a sort of beautiful longing…. It brings to mind what Toni Morrison says in the dedication to Sula about the ‘sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.’ It’s the textured sadness that comes from love.” —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, Silver Sparrow, Leaving Atlanta
“Isabel Pavão’s spaces are foundations for dreams. Visions well up from an ultramarine background. They are sometimes floral, they turn this way or that remembering a face. Here are roses that burst forth with blossoming charm. Elsewhere, veins run over the space like ribs of the world. Breathing and impulsiveness. Breaking off and slow eruption.” —Yves Peyre, “Meeting in the Utopia of Certainty,” accompanying text to the solo exhibition “10 Impressions of Rose and Sea,” Pagine D’Art Editions, Paris 2017
“Alternately landscape, flower, non-matter or geometry, the fabric belongs to the realm of the painting’s imagination. . . . It is precisely in this spectral domain of memory that Isabel Pavão places her Vestiges, going beyond the painting scene to become ‘subjects.’ By virtue of an amazing palimpsestic process, the different traces of history and of the pictorial act return.” —Christinne Buci Glucksman, “The Pictorial Aura of Vestiges,” for the solo exhibition “Vestiges,” Fluxus Gallery, catalog, Porto, 1990
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