Brenda Clews
Poet, painter, videopoet & photographer
Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Brenda’s Unwindings & The Answering Video: https://youtu.be/Foyvq1uDCM8
Woman Walking In-Verse Choreography, 2022, 17" x 10", deAtramantis inks on Strathmore drawing paper, 2022, NFS
Artist Statement:
For Calling In The Muse, I’m sharing two poems, Unwindings and Woman Walking In-Verse, both written this year. These poems share my inner perceptions in, hopefully, a language that is honed, polished, yet which flows, that has an aesthetic beauty of its own.
In Unwindings, Virginia Woolf is my muse. Re-reading her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, I came across a sentence that reverberated. Each day, another image arose in response. The final poem is about the unwinding in her novel, and the unwinding in us when we undergo inner revolution.
My second poem has four potential titles, Woman Walking In-Verse, Hanged Woman of the Tarot, Pittura Infamante, and Soul Question. My muse is my soul, whom I asked this question of. I took a Movement & Memoir course with Sara Porter in January 2022. We moved between dance and writing. In the session out of which this poem arose, she asked us to dance our deepest question. I was working with a concept of a personal ‘life review’ at that time, and I danced my question from my depths. Then we drew our dance on paper, and that drawing is now a choreography of the piece. We got up and danced again, this time guided by our drawing. After that, we sat and wrote about our question in the dance that transpired. Again we rose, danced, and after, noted shifts that occurred in the writing and the dance through the successive iterations. From this whole process, I later composed my poem and, because it has a choreography, can dance it anytime I read or recite it.
It was a unique way to experience and encounter what we are working with in our arts and I now always dance poems that I am working on, and will extend this process to my visual art when I begin painting and drawing again.
Because I was running my first Minstrels & Bards in two years at the end of April 2022 at the Tranzac, and Erica had asked for either a video or an audio of the poems, I decided to read them there since I video the whole poetry and music soirée anyway. Well, the footage from the camcorder was out of focus (the camera’s internal battery had run down during the pandemic and all settings were gone) and neither of my external mics worked! A dear friend did record the poems with a DSLR that could properly focus!
So much of creating a work, in whatever medium, is dealing with accidents or mistakes or over-workings, like a chef correcting a too salty dish. This was true in the video I have made for Calling In The Muse. Working to sharpen the video from the camcorder and decrease the rumbly background noise of the recording, I used different plugins. Then I cut between each camera’s takes. I tried to match the differing colours of each camera, not perfect but better.
Because I learnt when my children were little that distraction is often a great help, I found some animated effects to keep the viewer’s eye and which are, at times, perhaps a wee bit over-the- top humorous. The animations help to lighten the intensity of the writing. I also added three music tracks to the video (that I do have licenses for) because everything’s better with music.
Open Studio was a lovely experience when I was painting and drawing last year - having the company of other artists and Erica’s warm support was marvelous. My focus this year has been on writing and editing videopoems, but when I begin working in my studio again, I’ll be back for the camaraderie. The dance components of Erica’s Open Studio were particularly wonderful!
Bio:
Brenda Clews is a Zimbabwe-born Canadian multi-media poet, painter, videopoet & photographer. With two books, Tidal Fury (Guernica) & Fugue in Green (Quattro), she's published in CrossBridge, Synchronized Chaos, Juniper, & the forthcoming, Movement, Our Bodies in Action Anthology. Her artwork has appeared on journal covers, in solo (Urban Gallery & Q Space) & group shows, it is also featured on her book covers. She hosts Minstrels & Bards, a soirée at the Tranzac Club in Tkaronto/Toronto.
Contact: www.brendaclews.com
YouTube: brendaclews
Facebook: brenda.clews