ARTIST STATEMENT: MICHAEL AND SARA BIGGS CHANEY

“Biography of the Blade Back Girl” was originally conceived as a feminist fairy tale poem. As a collaborative collage, it still asserts an archetypal continuity in the experience of women writers across landscapes both real and imagined, and depending on the viewers, our collaborative result can be much more than we anticipate. The images that appear here represent the climax of the Blade Back Girl’s quest. At this moment in the sequence, her struggle against voicelessness is rendered. Her blade is a pen, a wound, and an index to the collagist’s scissors. Content and form are meant to resonate for the viewer. We invite you to look closer and to appreciate the contributions of “the cut” to the image as a whole. Our collaged views are both abstract and subtractive. They cut up a totality in order to present, optically-manageable windows or screens. One cannot remain merely a viewer in our works, however, but must become other things—a reader, at least, an interpreter, a sorter, an integrator—in order to experience the pieces as we do—as shared portals of possibility.

Michael and Sara Biggs Chaney are collaborative writer-artists and scholars. Their almanac-themed, multi-media visual artworks have appeared in juried art exhibitions across the country and their visual poetry is forthcoming or found in Redivider, Puerto del Sol, Rougarou, Timber, and Typo. They live in White River Junction in Vermont, and on their website.