Margo Berdeshevsky

Image / Text

Artist Statement

How to write poetry in war time, how to clean the ash out of the heart quickly enough to mix it with images and the scent of an ending and another terrible beginning, or blood that is too near and too distant to admit to my own fear? Yet, presences that are spiritual, mystical, insisting that I include them somehow.

That’s where my works come from in these times. I often find that the hybrid forms allow me to go where simple definition and description cannot. Or at least where I cannot without layering and overlaying. Drawing in inks and thin charcoals and washes, photographing, merging what I have made into layers that become  montages and collages. And then—being silent and letting the works speak, I hope, for themselves. I don’t like to be a maker who “explains” her work. As a poet and a photographer and a collagist, I have been feeling these months that my Cassandra hair is on fire. I know what I am afraid of. So do you, the reader, the viewer, the thinker. And that is where we meet—each of us—in the empty space filling with our images, fears, imaginings, deaths, and lives.

May we make it through these days with a little grace, and a recognition that, as Lisel Mueller wrote in her poem, “The Blind Leading the Blind”:

Something with wings went crazy against my chest once.
There are two of us here. Touch me.

—Margo Berdeshevsky