Nicolette Reim

Artist Statement

Artists and writers tend to work in more than one medium. Poets switch to picture-making, perhaps to take a break from struggling to make sense with words. Visual art has its own struggles with order, the rules are different for creating pictorial space on a flat surface from those configuring words to provoke mental images. Renunciation of standard uses of letters is found in many callings. Poetry can find itself on anything from a page of paper, to a stone, or the side of a building––isolated words or non-words can become ideograms, entirely themselves, free of connotation. Whatever the pursuit, an identifiable pattern must exist, otherwise an openness of form is simply rampant and self-indulgent incoherence.

Arrangements with letters that don’t form words is a means by which control can come from the individual rather than the “authority.” Pivoting from conventional means can produce a sort of system akin to tradition with a more personal view. Robert Frost referred to a lack of traditional poetic form as “playing tennis without the net.” Magritte remarked that people who look for symbolic meanings in visual art fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image––”What does this mean?” expresses a desire for everything to be understandable. Not having to define an image leads to other responses, and different questions. Playing “netless” in art/poetry, is a way to enter the possibilities of imagination.