Czeslaw Milosz and Karen Fitzgerald
Lake of Darkness was created as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry and what it means to be in the earth, to be embedded within the landscape.
The structure of Milosz’s poetry has a deep resonance for me. He evokes the individual, specific, and granular experience of being of the earth. His work also connects historical aspects of this sense with the physical experience of consciousness. When he labels the earth a ‘lake of darkness’ for creatures who are not winged—the ones that can lift themselves out and above—he offers a landscape that has meaning for all of us. Milosz’s poetry offers a transformational language that I have brought into visual form.
The natural world beckons to all of us if we slow down, listen, look, recall. The details emerge slowly and delicately, like the smell of linen drying on a clothesline. This project is a way of bringing that hyperawareness forward as a kind of re-knowing. The world is, after all, a Lake of Light. The darkness serves to make the light more defined, even more exceptional.
The Lake of Darkness portfolio is 19″x14″x1.” It contains 12 photogravure etchings and 5 letter press printed poems. It was originally published as an edition of 12 with 3 artist’s proofs. The double clamshell box is handmade by Claudia Cohen and the letterpress text is printed by Leslie Miller.
Five poems are included; The Bird Kingdom, It Was Winter, On Angels, On Prayer, and An Appeal. (For the full text of the poems, click here.)