Statements by Kia Groom & Marijke Loosjes
Kia Groom
Becoming
The day it changes
you wake to find
a hatching in your heart;
the bloated squirm of something
living,
hollowing you out.
You feel a tugging
underneath your eyes,
in the loose skin where you disappear inside
yourself, where you become
invisible.
You stare for a long time
in the mirror
until your face becomes foreign.
You know
in your bones
that time is muddy;
changing days are nothing
special.
One thing becomes
another.
Time peels back your layers slowly,
revealing more thoroughly
what might not be.
As a writer, I am not used to making executive decisions on how to visually present my work. 'Becoming' was motivated by the idea that change is not always dynamic and exciting, but sometimes slow, commonplace, dreary. I chose to display it as a series of movable/changeable words in order to make the piece interactive; it can, itself, become something else - it can undergo metamorphosis, depending on the whim of the reader.
Marijke Loosjes
There is a strong sense of delicacy I feel resonates within the poem 'Becoming'.
I wanted to portray this delicacy, this fragility, this emanating death and rebirth through forms of poetic abstraction and symbolism.
The small vessels in which my work resides in provide a protective shell. It is a safe space yet it exposes it's inner dwellers to the outside world. It unveils it's truth while keeping a distance.
Resting in a bed of feathers is a lone Sparrow's leg, reminiscent of an egg in a nest. A place felt with warmth, a cradle which nurses, obscured and redefined by the disjointed feeling of the unfamiliar.
Hanging and waiting, two exoskeletons embody the beginning and the end, although they are neither. Simply abandoned memories, left perfectly intact.
These pieces are a continuation of my current my art practice, dealing with the notion that by accepting death, we embrace life therefore the two are unified.
These two vessels are to be read separately and together.