by Carlene Phillips ·
Friday, July 10, 2026
One week remains to see the current exhibit at Fivesparks, which culminates in an Art and Poetry Stroll on Saturday, July 18, from 2 to 4 p.m., where visitors can interact with some of the show’s participants.
“Dialogues in Dual Languages” features 13 pairs of artists and poets responding to one another’s work; a gallery guide gives their bios and statements on their creative processes. Poet Wendy Drexler and artist Connie Saems conceived of the idea and organized the exhibit over a period of three years.
“It was thrilling to see the art all together,” said Drexler, during a recent conversation with the two women. They said the project got larger than anticipated, and they had trouble finding a venue for an exhibit. Gallery Twist in Lexington displayed some of the paired pieces, but finding Fivesparks was perfect because all 13 pairs could be on exhibit together.
Drexler met Saems “quite by accident.” She and her husband attended a pop-up art show in Wellfleet in 2023, and she was “blown away” by Saems’s installation of broken eggshells. She introduced herself to the artist and both of them were intrigued by the idea of collaborating; Drexler wrote a poem inspired by the eggshells. After that, they “jumped totally into” expanding their idea.
They sent invitations to visual artists and poets in the Boston area, describing the project and encouraging them to “create off of one another in any way they wanted.” Some artists with completed work knew poets they could pair up with. Other pairs decided together on a subject to explore in their separate media, and some artists and poets were paired by Drexler and Saems. “It was a lot of goldfish to try to herd,” said Saems. But she and Drexler had tenacity, and, she added, “Everyone was cooperative.”
Titled “Not Know,” the display of eggshells that was the impetus for the collaboration is on top of some shelves in the large gallery room. Saems described how the idea of the eggshells evolved. She had invited a friend to visit her studio—also the dining room. Realizing she hadn’t planned what she might demonstrate, she took up a pen and began writing the words to the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” on a newspaper and then tore it into pieces. Humpty Dumpty of course inspired her to think about broken eggs. For one year she saved eggshells from her breakfasts.
In that time her partner died, and when Saems returned to the project, the nursery rhyme turned into letters—letters about the fun times they had together, what she missed, and expressions of her grief. She ripped them apart and glued the pieces to the insides and outsides of the eggshells. In time, she wanted to express how, while still broken, she was mending. She repaired the shells using kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, silver, or platinum epoxy–the goal being to actually highlight the cracks and damage with bright, metallic binding.
In Drexler’s response, “Letters to the Beloved on Egg Shells,” she personifies Grief as “covering the brokenness/with the broken/to make a residue/of loss as unreadable/and unquenchable as Grief.”
Another collaboration between the two women started with Drexler’s poetry, which, like Saems’s eggshells, comes from a place of grief. Her husband has Alzheimer’s, and she has written poems about her journey as a caregiver. When she read Anne Carson’s “If Not, Winter,” a translation of fragments by the Greek poet Sappho, Drexler used the idea of fragments as another way of expressing the loss she was feeling as her husband became less and less himself. She wrote a series of poems, incorporating Sapphic fragments and then highlighted only the words of Sappho she had used, calling each poem “Erasure” followed by the number of the Sapphic fragment. In each case, the few remaining words create a stark expression of loss. It’s what Alzheimer’s is, Drexler said, “a process of erasure.” She said she needed to “cut through to the grim reality,” to “find new words” for her experience with her husband’s disease.
Saems said she had great respect for Drexler’s process. Using drawing as a foundation, she explored different materials, “allowing my work to emerge as a personal response to each poem.” In Drexler’s poem about her first visit to a memory care facility, bolded letters spell “danger.” Saems used green card stock and small wads of red silk twist to spell the word “Danger” and then: “Standing under da-n-g-er how to prepare.”
Poet Tom Laughlin wrote “Dark Edges” in response to a work of acrylic and collage on canvas called “River Sunset” by Matt Carrano, describing how summer evenings bring “darkness at the edges,” and the hint of houses along shores bring “whispers of memoried residents/Beneath and beyond the river’s dreamy reflections.” In response to the poem, Carrano painted two more scenes of the river and its “dark edges.”
Seven large sphinx moths of wire and tissue by Leslie Goldman swarm on a wall in the large gallery room. In the poem by Cynthia Barker about her brother’s sudden death, the speaker reacts to the unctuous undertaker and his empty words. “Who appointed him bardo/Commander? An eclipse of sphinx moths would like to know.”
Saems said of the exhibit: “Together our work creates a conversation between visual art and poetry. We hope that this exchange resonates with viewers and sparks their own imaginative and emotional responses.”