“Ghost Log”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: I love the visual collaboration of the broadside. My first beloved poetry group used to meet biweekly at the San Francisco Center for the Book, and it was there I dipped my toe into the art of making letterpress broadsides. I love the verb that ‘Broadsided’ makes, not only creating the broadside series, but invoking the action of bringing that art into the public, co-creating an audience based on who chooses to place these pieces and where.
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Janice Redman: The sense of time passed/passing, a space revealed, sand slipping away, the quality of memory and what is left after the moment/person is gone. The grasping, the inability to hold on… it is all so ephemeral and mysterious. These qualities within the poem drew me to it in a visceral way.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: I had been writing a collection of poems for and about the Pacific Coast Redwood Forests, and as I wrote poems for different trees, I realized that the forest was also filled with the spaces where trees had been, and in some places, you can see the negative space of a tree-shape cradled by other root systems and forms of growth. When I saw a Sitka spruce still holding the space of the long-decomposed nurse log it grew across, I thought: this, this is how you remember someone you love.
How did this image come to be?
Artist Janice Redman: I chose to not make a piece specifically for the poem, but to use a preexisting sculpture that spoke to it and resonated alongside it. This one kept reaching out to me.
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: I was so interested to see how both holding/carrying and how negative space would be interpreted. I felt confident these would stand out to a visual artist from the quick turn of the poem, and the beautiful piece that Janice Redman made both answered that and surprised me at the same time. It gave me a different visual language for holding something that has no matter.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Janice Redman: When I saw how the poem and the piece were placed together on the page, I was so delighted, it opened up the sculpture into a new realm. I love how the design works with the curves of the sculpture and seems to bring more attention to the curves around the object. It is so organic and fragile. The holes I cut out of the glove are always weakening and tearing, and the honeybees wrapped in the linen parcels continue to disintegrate… the insect pins are precariously holding it all together. The poem brings these tenuous qualities into the light for me.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator? (we will print your answers, too!)
Poet to Artist: Where did the matter/materials come from? When working with nature as material, how much of the process is based on discovery? How did you balance the exquisite holding?
Artist Janice Redman: Most of the materials I use in my work are intimately connected to me either personally or physically. In this case, the honeybees were from one of my hives that died one winter. The leather at the top part of the piece was from a small purse that I cut the cellular holes out of, the rest of the material was a glove that I cut the holes out of and then I stitched to the top part. Both are part of a collection of objects I find in various places, like flea markets. The linen, which I wrapped and stitched the bees into, was from an old duster car coat from the 1920s, and the shape that is being held inside the bottom of the sculpture is from an old linen doll’s head (so worn out there are no features to it… it could be a rock or any rounded form) that happened to have bee propolis on it (propolis was once commonly used as glue). Everything has an intimate connection to me or a human body… things that fit, that cover, that we can hold comfortably in our hands.
As for the second part of your question, I spend a lot of time on the beach, living on Cape Cod, and I am always inspired by the organic forms I find–how exquisite life is, the brilliant way things are formed or broken down by waves, wind, time, and salt water. The insect pins are the only thing that hold the piece together… it is fragile, but seems strong enough to hold… just.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue (see the “related broadsides” links on the left), what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: I love the work here, and the conversation these poems and works of art are having about spaces. Which I know sounds broad. But spaces feel quite particular for these poems. There is a lot of care and nuance in the way the spaces in these poems are weighty, present, tangible, honored, mourned, devastating, too much, not enough, there, not-there. Rooms, boxes, taxis, ditches, wounds, clouds, shelves, ghosts. Negative space becomes a held thing that complicates when we interact with it.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: It would have to be on a tree in a nature preserve in the San Bernardino mountains, and I intend to take it there. But also: any forest will do.
Artist Janice Redman: I think I would like the broadside to be posted somewhere in the Rose Garden in Torquay on the south west coast of England, where my mum’s ashes were scattered five months ago. I wasn’t able to be there, so it would feel really nice to pin this up on a tree nearby and remember her.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: Coastal fog with headlands.
Artist Janice Redman: I don’t know about the weather, but it feels like autumn.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: Take 4 very different texts (ex: Prague travel book, North American trees field guide, M Train by Patti Smith, Ways of Seeing by John Berger), and scatter-read them (random open, read a page, close, next) for 10 minutes, then write/make.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: Yes! I am reading my way through this terrible administration. All the books off my shelf I’ve bought but not read yet, going down in whatever order they ended up with. But I have to sing out James by Percival Everett, which we turned into a family read with myself, my husband, and our 14-year-old son, and the wondrous Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson, a book that waited patiently, and then reading it at last, I thought, “Where o where have you been?”
Artist Janice Redman: I just finished reading the YA novel Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. I really loved it!
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: I am lucky enough to live 25 minutes away from The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California. Recent exhibits I loved were Yolanda M. Lopez, “Women’s Work is Never Done” and “Portrait of the Artist,” and the group exhibit “Desde Los Cielos.” I would love to take the time to share, from their website, “The Cheech is home to the unparalleled Cheech Marin Collection of Chicano art. It is a space for continued exhibition, scholarship, and dialogue of Chicano art’s deep roots in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary and evolving response to current social conditions and global artistic movements.” Readers, if you ever get the chance to go there, I hope you will.
Artist Janice Redman: An installation at The Guggenheim Museum called “Sixth Stanza,” connecting poetry and visual art. In three of the top floor bays were large videos of poems in sign language created for “Ekphrasis in Air,” a public engagement project organized by the poet in residence, Meg Day. It was both riveting and beautiful watching a silent screen of a poem being expressed by the poet in sign language… amazing, I felt like I entered into a different and very rich world.