Kiera Faber and Philip Gross
In Creative Conversation
Kiera Faber works in the mediums of analogue photography, stop-motion animation, textiles, and drawing. Her recent animated film, The Garden Sees Fire, and a collaborative project with artist Jes Reyes, Do Not Bend, will premiere this autumn. Through implied narratives, Faber infuses a deference for mysticism, the unexplained, and truths found in the natural wild, to actively percolate in the unconscious. She has been creating hand-coated, photographic cyanotypes and coloured pencil drawings in creative conversation with poet Philip Gross for over three years—weaving connections in time and place, while acknowledging the precious fragility of our existence.
Gross has collaborated with writers, musicians, and especially visual artists throughout his writing life, e.g in A Fold in the River (Seren, 2015) with Valerie Coffin Price. The creative conversation between his poems and Kiera Faber’s cyanotypes is informed by the Quaker context in which their exchanges began, with her ‘intimate investigations of light, darkness, and silence.’ Over two years, their mutual responses have touched on subjects from memory, displacement, and trauma, both personal and historical, to childhood and ageing, from a reaching for what’s almost out of reach of language to the material process of photography and cyanotype.
Philip Gross
On the Waters
We could be in at the birth
of something here, a galaxy
or moment when a pebble tossed
in water, rat’s leap from the bank,
or murder weapon in a dark canal,
begins to sink. The splash
knows nothing of this, only how to rise
in its corona, fall back, ripple out
towards infinity.
The innocence of things.
But ask the bubbles struggling,
distending upwards in their fumble
at the surface, which resists.
This moment, stilled, as if in ice:
somebody’s life, a whole cosmology.
These are the days of awe
though this might be a microsecond
in the grey churn of a river,
Danube, Rhine, Dnieper,
through a continent’s history,
and what is scattered on the waters
might be a city’s refuse, ash,
a ritual crumbling of bread
to stand for all our sins – cleanse me,
you dirty river – or on a microscope
slide, might be chromosomes
jostling in the current of a life,
like cut logs rafted downstream,
now wedged in the narrows
and it all depends on those log-walkers
with their long poles, somehow balancing
out on that murderous pause,
a rumbling heave beneath,
to prise them free.
Kiera Faber, A ways away, cyanotype, 2024
Philip Gross
Permeable
As if we might melt and push through
the day’s surface, like ghosts through a wall,
into a place less sure, no less true,
just not quite in focus… Blink,
no, it isn’t your eyesight; the landscape is all
smoke and shadows. As ink
bleeds through cheap paper (PTO
to find a hieroglyph, or ransom note, in a hand
you both do and don’t know)
the unconscious, so wearied
by therapists, mediums, priests, might send
a postcard in words we can’t read
though they’re our own, a photograph
of… are they far mountains, fading as we watch…
or an end-gable, last house, half-
gone, gutted? And the shade of trees,
is that, crowding the bank of a river colourless as loss
beyond words… or shadow-people, refugees
come so far, to be so close? They can see but can’t cross.
Kiera Faber, Vacant, cyanotype, 2024