Ink Sweat and Tears is very pleased to welcome our new artist/poet in residence, C. Albert.  C. Albert is a collage artist and poet based in the United States, and this is what she says about her practice:

‘As a child, I often wrote plays and performed them with friends. I wanted to be an artist who lived in an attic. I studied both visual art and literature in college and actually lived in an attic for 13 years.

 Years before discovering collage, I collected images from magazines, gluing favorites into a blank book. It followed naturally that I began to use found imagery when making art: cutting, tearing and gluing orphan pieces back together in strangely appealing new ways. When I started including text from magazines into collages, the words were cryptic but enticing: I wanted to write too.

Poetry was always a vegetable I didn’t “get”, like beets, yet that’s what I wrote. Now I think poetry and beets are mysterious; steamed beets are especially delicious with feta cheese, walnuts and pomegranate juice. 

 Working in multimedia is something like cross-training for athletes. Collage is like silent poetry and poems can express narrative embedded in collage more explicitly. The combinations are intended to create expansive experiences. Which comes first, the chicken-poem or the collage-egg? The answer is either or both at the same time!

I catch the muse’s seeds from conceptual ideas, observation, memory, and dreams, along with found imagery and found words as prompts. Being in kind with surrealism, I observe the magic of inexplicable coincidence.’

Over the coming year, we will be featuring her words and images here.  I will start by showing you her art table, the collage which grew from it and the poem which grew from that.  The poem Artist Poem was first published in Woman Made Gallery, Her Mark.

The Art Table

Seeds: mixed media collage

Artist Poem

In a quiet room images cascade
as seeds
from my fingertips
Settle through the restless hours

Words, fabrics, papers, lace
compose juxtapose, light dark
golds and silvers

Through dreams remember feeling

Fall away, catch
begin, touch
lines curve into roundness

Glue holding
ripe melons
hands reaching
eyes peeking through petals

Wings

The photograph of C. Albert’s art table is taken by Matthew Casey

C. Albert can be contacted through inksweatandtears@aol.com

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