Artist Statement:
These LPs (Light Poems) grew from a life-long, internal fascination and conversation with light and shadow. Influenced by James Turrell’s large scale light installations, the quiet of Agnes Martin’s grids and the small scale of Dickinson’s envelope fragments, light and shadow work as formal constraint shaping the text on the page, often through a window. I usually begin writing in either the light or the shade. However, they often shift so fast as I write, by the time I take the photograph, the text sometimes ends up somewhere between the two. That surprise, the visual shift in “real” time, influenced the textual content. The electronic re-visions were an effort to allow some words to rise and others to fade–light and shadow translated into text—and/or to allow the text to transform into the shape of a feeling on the page.
Twila Newey received her M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa. She was a finalist for the 2019 Coniston Prize at Radar Poetry and won honorable mention in the 2019 JuxtaProse Poetry Contest. Her poems also appear in various journals including Green Mountains Review, Guesthouse Lit., and Summerset Review. Twila is a poetry editor for Psaltry & Lyre. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.