GRACE (GE) GILBERT (they/them) is the author of Holly (YesYes Books 2025) and 3 chapbooks. they are a poet, essayist, and collage artist based in Pittsburgh. their work has been featured this year in Pleiades, The Journal, The Boiler, blush, Foglifter, Passages North, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. they teach hybrid image and text workshops at Brooklyn Poets, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and at local museums. find more at g_eva__ on Instagram, or at gracegegilbert.com.
For the past two years, I've been working on my second book, which began as a collection of prose poem fragments. These fragments were inspired by an exhibit by Syanda Yaptik at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh called "PERFORMANCE FOR RELATIVES," in which the artist shared handwritten prose fragments about their strained family relationships, and instructed the viewer to perform a specific action in response. I began to compile prose fragments about family, memory, childhood, and my adult body on pieces of printer paper, on journal pages the size of a small photograph. In the past few years, I've collected and transcribed dozens of these fragments, and began to create collages in my studio that spoke in the spaces between them. Unlike in my first book, where I use family artifacts to collage, in this collection I've turned to found images, which resonate more with my feelings about childhood, alienation, and the selfhood and gender that were projected onto me. Last year, I endured a hospitalization which resulted in an OCD diagnosis. I call this collection of collage experiments "splits," reflecting the difficulty of allowing two things to be true at the same time, one of the hardest things to do as someone with OCD. What is happening inside feels just as real as what is happening outside, and in this way, it is sort of like memory. My memory is honest, but it is not always entirely true. I try to grapple with this tension in these pieces.
Artist Statement
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
grace (GE) Gilbert
