Kathleen Stewart, an award winning anthropologist discussed her experiences in New England through poetry Friday as part of the Blaffer Art Museums guest lecture series on Materiality.
Ubiquitous things have form, and matter poems can depict how those forms of life hold together, said Kathleen Stewart, an award-winning anthropology professor from the University of Texas at Austin during her seminar Wednesday evening at the Blaffer Art Museum.
The Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series invited Stewart to discuss her book project, “Worldings,” a collection of matter poems personifying New England in relation to the current theme: materiality.
“My focus is to transform the sound of language into writing,” Stewart said. “I want to push the edges of what people think is acceptable. In ‘Worldings,’ I learn how to incorporate the different trajectories and experiences of things.”
Stewart said she illustrated the American road as an emergence of streams of matter and thoughts. She also described the color red through a perception of a local house and expressed “pockets” as dark human spaces in a room where something changed.
“I want to capture the worlds in different intensities and to capture how uniquely people enter these worlds. My work experiments with the sensory materiality of forms of attunement to these worlds,” Stewart said.
Rex Koontz, director of the School of Art, has worked with Stewart and said he believes she wants to understand the poetry of everyday life by questioning aspects that are seemingly ordinary and concrete.
“Stewart uses rich imagery much more effectively than most academics,” Koontz said. “She takes us down a New England road with its colors, sounds and smells. She stops before a walking bridge to muse on its form color.”
Instead of believing or not believing, Koontz said he thinks the matter poems provide an essential service to the art world.
“Matter poems push back against overly simplistic quantifications and rigid interpretive paradigms,” Koontz said. “It frees us to look closely and to pay attention to the way forms constitute themselves throughout time.”
Art history freshman Brandon Zech said he was interested in Stewart’s connection with Tony Feher’s work, which is displayed in the Blaffer gallery, and the parallels between their ideas of poetry in everyday actions.
“I was intrigued by her idea that poetry was all-encompassing of everyday life and that it was present in every little thing in our daily routines,” Zech said. “Stewart is simply putting into words what is common of everyday life.”
Zech said he believes in the concept of matter poems and its prominence in current studies. He described matter poems as a way to see beauty in the everyday.
“I think that life in itself is a sort of unwritten poetry,” Zech said. “This idea is significant, because when one looks at their life in this way, it makes their life seem very meaningful.”
