ARTIST STATEMENT
When I was ten or eleven, I kept a three-ring binder full of house plans I’d drawn. My dad was a contractor, and while he didn’t generally draw his own plans, he always had them around. They excited me with possibilities. I was particularly proud of the circular house. In between wanting to be an archeologist and a private investigator, I definitely had an architect phase. These schematics are a natural extension of those house plans and a reflection of the direction life actually took: poetry. When I was going through a dry period in my poetry life a few years ago, I started drawing the weird collections of gears and engine parts that my designer-maker husband had lying around, which then morphed into what I called schematics of the insides of poems, their architecture and undergirding, transferring language to image, with some linguistic guideposts (master bedroom, half bath, etc.).
BIO
Alexis Orgera is a writer, editor, doodler, publisher, and plant person living in North Carolina. She’s the author of two poetry collections, How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket, and a forthcoming memoir-in-fragments, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms (Kore Press, December 2021). Her most recent work can be found in Conduit, Diode, Hotel Amerika, La Vague, Love’s Executive Order, Passages North, and Third Coast. More at alexisorgera.com.