“Ditibaabide / The Rolling”

Posted on May 1, 2021 • Words by Margaret Noodin • Art by Meghan Keane

Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet Margaret Noodin: The image of the rollers fascinated me because they are so thin and consist mostly of a round skeleton used to put air and motion into hair.  Artist Meghan Keane: As a solo portrait that I had always viewed as playful yet having fairly massive and megalithic properties (like Carnac on someone’s head, a curler topography of sorts), I am fascinated that while each vision is so evidently distinct, they both hold something in common that I myself didn’t see.

Artist Meghan Keane is a painter and printmaker. She is the founding director of meghan.keane.studio. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Poet Margaret Noodin is the author of Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows: Poems in Anishinaabemowin and English, and is co-creator of www.ojibwe.net.

Tagged: Animals, Beauty, Ekphrastic Poetry, Indigenous (language), Multilingual, Painting: Acrylic, Relationships, Switcheroo

“Niizhosagoons gemaa Nisosagoons Daso-biboonagad” / “Two or Three Thousand Years”

Posted on November 1, 2018 • Words by Margaret Noodin • Art by Meghan Keane

Collaborators’ Q&A: Do you see an overlap between the act of translation and the act of responding visually to a piece of literature? Poet Margaret Noodin: …The idea moves as words from one language to another and then as color into a pattern. Both respond to the reality of a river and what water and its circulation means to the earth. Artist Meghan Keane: …Responding visually is always a question of legibility to me, how will my drawing be read, what are the multiple readings of it that coexist together? How can I translate the poem into a non-verbal experience yet maintain the poetic integrity and not veer into illustration? 

Poet Margaret Noodin is author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and Weweni, a collection of bilingual poems in Ojibwe and English. To see and hear current projects visit www.ojibwe.net Artist Meghan Keane is a painter and printmaker. She is the founding director of meghan.keane.studio and a visiting alumni artist at the Brooklyn College art department printshop.

Tagged: Climate Change / Climate Crisis, Drawing, Ecopoetry, Indigenous (language), Multilingual, Myth / Legend, Print / Monotype, Translation