BODIES OF WATER AND WOMEN

ARTIST STATEMENT

The chemical and physical properties of water are consequential for all living organisms. Water fills the shape of cells and forms strong bonds as it moves through the precipitation cycle. It cycles through organisms, architecture, atmosphere, rock, rivers, and oceans. As water cycles through the world, it accumulates our histories, our stories, and what we leave behind. We, the women in this exhibition, view water as a shape-shifting symbol that remembers everything.

Gresoski and Rainer worked together to create an immersive experience that combines digital technology, fine art, and poetry. By creating an immersive experience utilizing color, space, sound, and texture, we aim to bring these poems to life in a way that transcends traditional ideas of what reading is and who poetry is for.

When a poem sits on a piece of paper in size twelve font, who is that poem for?

Poetry tends to get divided into camps of “on the page” versus “on the stage,” but where’s the discussion about making poetry more accessible to all readers? Is reading the only way to enter a poem? What about listening? What about visually absorbing a poem’s meaning, beyond the mere words that have been written down?

ARTIST BIO

Kira Gresoski is an ecofeminist copywriter and poet. Her work explores the endless continuum of human/nature. Growing up in North County, St. Louis, Gresoski would spend her childhood summers exploring the waterways and creeks near her home, connecting with any green space she could find in a sprawling, working class suburbia. It wasn’t until she graduated from college and returned to St. Louis that she learned of the radioactive waste legacy in her hometown. Mobilized by this information, she began an MFA in poetry at Pacific University, writing poems that reflected the messy intersections of gender, class, race, and the history of US violence against the earth and its inhabitants. She self-published Bodies of Water & Women in 2020, hoping to make this conversation accessible to her community.

Her poems have been published in Windfall, On Sisterhood, and Missouri’s Best Emerging Poets. When she’s not writing poetry or spending time in her garden, she’s creating websites and marketing campaigns for creators, healers, leaders, and forces of nature. She’s developing her own framework to help unconventional entrepreneurs grow their bodies of work, without sacrificing the health of their bodies or the bodies of the earth. You can keep up with her at www.kiragresoski.com

Natalie Rainer is a new media artist with a background in printmaking and biology. Natalie’s printworks reflect her organic perspective on both technology and landscape. Her work is rooted in the varying landscapes life’s journey has taken her through. Adopting technology as a medium for producing and distributing her artwork, Natalie’s landscapes became a simultaneous simulacrum of organic and digital environments. She completed an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis in 2017 after experimenting in projection and creating thesis work centered on her concepts of augmented reality and digital technology’s effect on the human disposition toward nature.

Natalie’s works are on permanent display and have been featured in international shows. She has served consecutively as video editor at the Berlin Science Week hosted at Humboldt University. Outside of her work as an instructional designer, Natalie has standing positions with several institutions in and around St. Louis providing design and motion graphics to selected projects. Find more information about Natalie and her work at www.rainercreate.com