“Words in Air” is a site-specific collaborative installation that I created with Jennifer Caine during our time as the Edward E. Elson Artists-in-Residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art.  The installation is inspired by the language of painting and poetry and the powerful ways in which each art form communicates distillations of experience.  Comprised of a series of floor-to-ceiling painted, sewn, and hand-cut paper “pages,” the piece resembles a human scale artist’s book—a porous container of light and color. For this piece, we transcribed a selection of poems by 20th century American female poets—letter by letter—in an invented shorthand of simplified marks to create a chorus of poetic voices into a single visual response.

Photos Courtesy of Frank Graham