The Pandemic Lens^®

I am a published poet and novelist. I began working in collage as a way to further indulge my fascination with story.

Collage is a kind of visual poetry. It seeks coherence amidst disorder, elegance amidst anarchy. It traverses a subterranean landscape, where who we are and what we experience is reflected back at us through the mirror of our canvases. When I sit down to work on a collage, I almost never know where it is going. Pieces find other pieces, of their own volition, assembling themselves into what is ultimately the answer to a question I never knew I was asking.

 

 

 

In this context, one’s work is never very far from one’s life, from one’s surroundings. Like nothing else in our lifetimes, COVID has redefined what it means to live and to breathe, to mourn, to exist as a human being amidst and apart from other human beings. For me, its arrival on the scene also coincided with the abrupt decline of my father into late-stage Alzheimer’s disease and dramatic changes in my mother’s health status and living requirements.

 

 

 

All of this—the loss, the grief, the distillation of what relationships mean in the age of COVID—has wended its way into my art. The themes of isolation and absence are writ large in many of these pieces. So too the sense of yearning – for something, for someone, for a world that’s disappeared, for a world that hangs just out of reach.

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 Kim Triedman