Three Questions for Shivani

What inspired your choice of medium, genre and/or form for your work?

Collaborating with artists like Joe have opened my heart & brain to experimenting with sound, imagery and the pulse of the poem. I see poetry as a living, breathing thing, not a sanitized medium to be experienced in silence. It was so rewarding to engage in a playful process to arrive at these 3 hybrid pieces.

What was your creative process?

I often go through obsessions in my noticing, and they tend to make their way into my poems. This set of poems came from an observation of my hands, my body & their relationship to impermanence. I have been a spoken word poet & a page poet, but experimenting with multi-media & collaborative pieces is a newer entrant in my creative practice, and a most welcome one when words don't feel quite enough.

What is the significance of this work to you?

This work reminds me of our abilities to break patterns, and the ease of falling back into old ones. I have since stopped biting my nails (a lifelong struggle), and have been brought in more texture to my writing. Collaborating with Joe and experimenting with mixed mediums helps me ask what other senses might be engaged to bring a piece to life.

Three Questions for Joe

What inspired your choice of medium, genre and/or form for your work?

My collaboration with Shivani of visualising her words began in 2016 where we were collectively exploring our past traumas and how creation could be a cathartic process. The forms we arrived at helped us gain/heal our agency so that we could imagine a better future for ourselves - one where we were in control of our reality and its story.

This complex thought experiment often failed its articulation over simple visual forms. This challenge birthed a visual form called reflective realism - a style which involves conscious repetition of the motifs in an organic exploratory practice. Each stroke informs the next much like our retrospection of our past to be able to move forward. 

What was your creative process?

The creative process involves the sowing of words as seeds (Shivani sharing her poem/words with me) and it resulting in the identification of the central motifs of the artwork. They are then placed as a kaleidoscope allowing the viewer to make as many meanings as possible.

What is the significance of this work to you?

The significance of this work is deeply personal to me. Our collaborations find each other when we need a creative channel to allow our thoughts and emotions to exist without critique but rather thrive in curiosity. A space where we allow our minds to play around with each others creations with admiration and joy. It helps us communicate with a larger community of thinker-feeler-doers and for that I will always be grateful.

Shivani Gupta is a writer, curator & researcher. Her writing is an effort to hold multiple identities without forcing resolution. Her work has featured globally in BBC, Forbes, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Mumbai Poetry Slam, Loyola University Chicago, Baby Teeth Journal, Ranger Magazine, The Well & more. She is a current ISL fellow & serves as the Dev Committee Chair for the Chicago Poetry Center. She loves sauces, baked goods & all round silliness. 

Joseph is the chief jolly officer at Oji, apart from being a visual thinker, he also actively works on the vision setting and energy planning for OJI. After spending close to 15 years in excel sheets and powerpoint presentations, his current abode is at a farm where his daily colleagues are a cow, some chickens and a whole lot of nature. He enjoys to observe and articulate through illustrations, photography, animations and memes.