Sculpting Poetry – Portraits with Interwoven Lines and Light – Noah Saunders revisions Marc Zegans
The art of writing poetry based upon paintings or other artworks is a subject that is close to my heart, alongside the art of combining both in ekphrastic poetry films (see also the bilingual Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow publication and prize). It is also not unusual to create paintings or other forms of art based on poems, less common to create wire sculptures based upon the human figure, and, as I believe today, wholly original to create wire sculptures in human form based upon poems, illuminated and then accompanied by the poems themselves.
American artist and poet Noah James Saunders (from Athens, Georgia) has been working with wire sculptures for 35 years, and his recent first solo show at the Marietta Cobb Museum in Marietta, Georgia, (near Atlanta) is a testament to the journey he has made, and also includes his Wire and Shadow – Portraits of Poems series. He was first inspired by the medium at school, where a workshop in the subject saved his life. ‘As a queer, neurodivergent, and physically disabled child, I had grown accustomed to being told that I was abnormal, tasting the sting of humiliation, and the isolation of being perceived as “too different” to be understood. But in wire, I found a material unconventional as myself—fluid, ungoverned, and resistant to easy categorization. It was validation.’ He was also dyslexic and told he would never learn how to read. But, he says, they didn’t ask if he liked reading, and so he determined to find books himself, especially those which captured his imagination. He said in a recent presentation at OCAF (Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation) ‘My entire life with art has been based on a lie … because I really love reading’… As he began working with wire he found he needed to anchor each piece with a word – fear, love, etc. which helped keep focus. He also began to write poetry, being inspired by the words of others, which he said could at times ‘make him weep’. And this is where American poet Marc Zegans comes in.
Over to Marc
‘Several years ago, Noah attended a video talk that Brainard Carey invited me to do for his Praxis group for artists. We corresponded after that and soon became friends. I advised him on many aspects of his creative development as a sculptor and edited a great number of his poems. He was just starting out as a poet, and I helped him develop the skills he needed to fully express himself in that medium. Noah had also been working for some years on the history of a fictive city-state called Ephemera to which I contributed the characters and written account of the meaning of the major arcana in the Ephemran Tarot. This led to other projects including:a theatrical production emanating from my Typewriter Underground collection in Athens, Georgia, Noah’s home town; ‘El Poema de la Caja’ (published by Alchemy), a poem I wrote at Noah’s suggestion, and the series of sculptures he made called Portraits of Poems.’
Marc Zegans
From Noah’s Point of View
‘I began to gather images of models but felt something was missing. If this was to be a series, I realized I needed an emotional well from which to draw, not simply images. I needed a story arc to unify the series. Turns out that the emotional well I needed was in my mailbox! My friend and poet Marc Zegans had mailed me his latest book Lyon Street – a book of poems about coming of age in San Francisco in the ‘70’s and the early ‘80’s. A book in which his wiser self speaks with his younger self. It could not have been a more perfect inspiration!
As I read Marc’s verse, certain words really spoke to me – ‘as I catch and throw him to the salt’… ‘tonight, I turn and remember’… ‘I ignore him and break’… ‘a thin line of love tethering you to shore’… ‘no plans of moving on. You look out’. I was amazed at how easy it was to marry Zegans’s poetic lines to models I keep in my files. Each stanza that moved me had its own precise set of needs. Some required only a face staring out. Others wanted more, an arm, even a tattoo to round out the meaning embodied in the chosen string of words. Over the next twelve months my studio began to fill with diverse personalities. The wire portrait series, that I had dreamed up in my youth, was coming to life. After much meditation I named this series: “Wire and Shadow – Portraits of Poems.”’
Text, Wood Panel and Wire Portrait
Poems Sculpted in the Human Form
Noah also describes the project as: ‘Poems Sculpted in the Human Form’, weaving wire portraits from Marc’s outstanding memoir Lyon Street (from his life in San Francisco in the 1970s, and which I covered in depth in Liberated Words). In gallery installations these are then hung a few feet from the wall via a wall mount (often turning) and illuminated, casting shadows in front of the poems etched on white canvases. Through this process Noah is able to respond and also, at the same time, to extend the original poem in his own voice (visual voice through sculpture and sometimes actual voice in a reading). In the show at OCAF, Georgia (which incidentally led to an invitation for a solo show) one of his portraits “Tonight I Turn and Remember,” inspired by the poem ‘North Beach’ was on display, and he also read the poem for the audience. It felt like a live ekphrastic moment, as it were – revisiting and repeating the original inspiration.
Noah reading with his self portrait at OCAF. Photo Craig Gum Photography
There is also a sense of open access, of divining mood in a poem: of a meditative, delicate, gentle and tenuous gathering through the turning and shaping of hands. From one type of line to another: from mind to page, from page to a three-dimensional web in space that unwinds as a human eye. Every strand of wire intricately wrapped and shaped to convey a human state of mind or a lifelike strand of hair. We cannot ask ‘How does he do this?’ but the question remains. I was trained in drawing and painting, (also to attempt to really see) and also used to paint portraits, and the push and pull of dabs of colour on a canvas that become parts of the body are instinctive and yet learnt. Years developing a facility for noticing the correct weight, space, light and dark, texture – idiosyncratic characteristics that reveal themselves as you work. Noah is highly attuned to all these nuances. Moreover, he does not overpower the original poem but lets it breathe through the portraits. Of course, the words from Marc’s poem are literally seen through the wire when projected onto the wall beyond.
Texts and Multiple Selves, ‘Tonight’ visible top centre.
Reverse Ekphrasis
In the OCAF solo presentation he begins by asking the question, ‘How to find a narrative from decades of solitary work?’ In poetry film the isolation of working alone isn’t often discussed, perhaps because it is often a collaborative process. But in his Portraits of Poems Noah does have a collaborator of sorts. He both unwinds Marc’s lines and rewinds them as his own in a different form, whilst retaining the original source. In terms of the psychology of working with sculptures and the poetry of others Noah says he ‘bridges two universes – with words I find a sense of community and connectedness into a world so much bigger than my own’ but then he also loves finding those moments in people beyond presentation; where they reveal their true selves, which he can sculpt in wire. ‘A tiny crack that I bridge with this other universe.’ Marc calls Noah’s work a type of Reverse Ekphrasis.
In all of this we feel the humanity that is shared, that is palpable. How words and communication become a celebratory process rather than a dumb interjection or affront or criticism etc. etc. perhaps reinstating the resonant power of words for Noah, rather than remembering them as vicious blows, echoing his experiences as a child. Each of these portraits feels also in some way evidential: of how we are captured by words and are made good through words. The installation also invites us to consider a philosophical mode; a non-dualist approach. To go one stage further, Noah views this series as self-portraits. Marc’s original lines describing his youth become the lines that describe Noah. This isn’t appropriation in the strictest sense, but reverence and also repurposing to a degree, whilst in the gallery installation, a blending of art and artist performance akin to a liturgical offering up. Whilst a metaphorical reading is easy to make where shadows reflect a sense of deeper associated emotional memories, on another level I am reminded of candle-lit camera obscuras and how biblical texts (reversed and inverted) were projected onto walls.
The Audience Aids Illumination. ‘No Plans’ visible top centre. Photo by Craig Gum Photography
Noah relates: ‘Each portrait is designed to be suspended midair a few feet from the gallery wall. On the wall behind the sculpture hangs a 5′ x 5′ square wood panel painted in deep gessoed strokes. This functions as the portrait’s “page,” (also echoing the shape of Marc’s book) into which I have etched the verse that inspired the sculpture, its words visible only when the angle of the light is just right. Viewers are handed a flashlight that projects in crisp lines the shadow of the wire face onto the wood panel. The flashlight and shadow are integral to our full experience of the sculpture because the wire form is simply a prism, its shadow revealing the true spectrum of the sculpture’s emotional content.’ And, as Marc notes, what is significant creatively is that ‘the shadows of the wire forms are integral to, not a by-product of, the sculptures. This becomes vividly apparent in the image of one sculpture (also part of the Portrait series) being projected on a building wall to a height of over thirty feet.’
Photo by Craig Gum Photography
The installation as a whole suggests both a childlike joy and sense of discovery for the torch holder, and also a sort of unadulterated performance of cinematic process. Here the protagonist (Noah) is caught in a moment, then his/Marc’s script/ thoughts are illuminated by the audience who are creating the projection themselves. The protagonist’s performance is then doubled when Noah himself reads the poem, as well, sitting next to his portrait. This is me here and me there. The cinematic me if you like, absorbed in Marc’s words. Here I am, the reader who has been changed by the lines that float through and dazzle my skull.
Importantly, Noah is showing us how one mind responds to another as a moment in time, but also a moment that is performed; an installation, where he is also part of the performance. In this Reverse Ekphrasis, lines change their form, but also the poem remains, and is also spoken by the new ‘artist-author’. A transformation of sorts is taking place and it is hard not to call up the sense of an alchemical experiment. However, because the original poem remains intact the process can be undone, too.
Conversely, Marc can remain the author and speaker, as in the video As I cut and Threw Him to the Salt (https://www.bamboodartpress.com/store/marc_zegans-lyon_street.html) where Marc reads the poem as voiceover, with the wire portrait onscreen. Here there is a Reverse Ekphrasis and Ekphrasis together, a sort of intermutuality. Marc’s poem inspires the sculpture and we see this turning as he delivers the carefully crafted poem in his sonorous, musical, subtly portentous rhythms and tones. It is a dialogue of sculpture and poetry. At first, we are in a gallery location with shadow, and then the portrait turns against various colours and textures, with an atmospheric washing and tolling soundtrack. Dennis Callaci has done a great job creating mood in the editing. Equally, Noah has said that it is the mood and energy of the poem that prescribes the portrait.
Video by Craig Gum Photography
There is a difference between Noah reading alongside the installation, and the poem recited as voiceover by Marc with the sculpture onscreen. When Marc reads, rather than ekphrasis, or reverse ekphrasis, we return to the original artist, the origin, to see and hear a doubling of ekphrasis, or the poem and artwork as co-responsive event. Many years ago I made hand-painted ‘cave’ lampshades, where the thick oil paint on the parchment was incised with cave figures – humans and bison etc. When lit the shade would glow with these characters, creating a world of its own. Noah’s intricately woven illuminated self, expanding into and through Marc’s poetry (or perhaps the other way around) creates a mesmerising, constantly changing dialogue of forms: one where shadow represents psyche, and the overall, evolving bi-authored construct creates an infinite flow of mutually responsive, interwoven voices.
See ‘As I cut and Threw Him to the Salt’ and Noah’s OCAF presentation at: Lyon Street, Bamboo Dart Press https://www.bamboodartpress.com/store/marc_zegans-lyon_street.html)
Noah’s quotations from: https://www.noahjamessaunders.com/
This interview on MPR goes into a lot of detail on Wire and Shadow
https://www.wabe.org/sculptor-noah-james-saunders-casts-light-and-shadow-in-first-solo-museu m-exhibition/
Noah James Saunders – b. 1980 Atlanta Georgia
Noah James Saunders has lived and worked in Athens GA as a full time artist for the past twenty five years. His sculptures have traveled far – exhibited as a finalist in the global Luxembourg Prize arts competition, in various museums and galleries, and most recently at the New Creature Comfort Brewery in Los Angeles, where he was its first artist in residence, at the Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, and recently had his first solo museum art show at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.
Marc Zegans
http://www.marczegans.com/
Marc Zegans is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative development advisor who helps artists, writers, and creative people thrive and shine. He is the author of seven collections of poems, most recently Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020), and several immersive theatre productions including, with D. Lowell Wilder, “Sirens, Dreams, and a Cat.” Ghost Book (Kite String Press) a fine art photo book made in collaboration with photographer Tsar Fedorsky, was published in April 2024. Marc writes a poetry review column, “On the Cutting Edge,” for Liberated Words. Films based on Marc’s poems appear regularly at festivals around the world. He lives by the coast in Northern California.
