--by Jane. C Knol
Miriam and Ron Pederson have been married for upwards of 25 years, and have been working in aesthetic collaboration for the better part of seven. Their latest show of Miriam’s poetry and Ron’s sculpture literally came together over the last nine months, through a combination of intentional collaboration and Providential coincidences. It seems fitting that the exhibit be named The Enduring Conversation.
The overlap of the visual and the verbal art of this show is the result of shared process. Ron Pederson kept a manilla folder of Miriam’s poetry in his clay studio, and each night Miriam would walk down through his studio to see his day’s work. In this way, they share imagery. While both husband and wife spoke of the dangers of such closeknit expression--such as allowing the sculpture to become merely illustrative of the poetry, or to allow the poetry to become strictly explication of the visual forms--the beautiful thing about this exhibit is that there is something familial established between printed word and clay, but the resemblance evolves gently. When we started, Ron Pederson explained, all we knew was that we wanted collaboratively to create figures in relation.
He then introduced me to his favorite cohesive pairing: his sculpture Sprout in conjunction with Miriam’s poem, November. The poem all by itself works in coupling images, of things deteriorating with things that bloom, of pieces of sorrow matched amazingly to a kind of inspiration. Alone, the abstract sculpture also demonstrates a stricken duality of a curling, dying leaf against the strong vertical form of the sprout. But when you put these objects of poetry and sculpture in touch with one another, the theme, that life is two-fold becomes imminently more meaningful, because the idea is reinforced by the two media. We’ve been told of the things that bear repeating; here they are manifested. The repetition is clear, but it seems as though one work is a complete translation of the other. This is the beauty of Miriam and Ron’s conversation. Sometimes, as with November and Sprout, the conversation is realized accidentally. In putting together this show, the collaborators thought that this sculpture and the poem were the outcasts of the show, until suddenly they saw the intricate, providential way the works fit into one another.
But to me, it seemed that the cumulative force in the room was the poem Epiphany. Because unlike the other poetry, this verse is carved into a dense clay slab. This is the centripetal point because it’s her words in relief on his clay. The media intertwine completely, once, in this piece. Uncharacteristically, Ron also worked in the revision of this poem alongside Miriam. Their exceptional, different creativities are conjoined just here, near perfectly.
Epiphany describes a person looking for a spool of thread beneath a couch, and finding other things that rolled under the furniture: two marbles, a penny dated 1957, and a #2 pencil. And the discovery, or epiphany, seems so ordinary, until you reach the last four lines: In this humble space you can see what muscles heaven with infinite churning, what calls the dazzle out of the dark, what etches the night sky with the day of your birth. Really, the poem began so humbly, so simply, with inconsequential things, of as little value as a penny. The poem began with common things, all of them replaceable. Yet out of this mundane collection, rises something still humble, but so meaningful: that in the entirety of the firmament, our existence and our subsequent, if short, endurance are engraved, into the sky. They are engraved there as the incarnation of Christ is carved out of the heaven. We are placed by God. As Miriam said, You can take the last few lines quite literally, I think.
Ron described Epiphany as the thesis statement for the show. Surely the show is full of epiphanies. They renew the momentum of our endurance. And while the Pedersons meant their title The Enduring Conversation only originally in the terms of longevity, the endurance they have captured is also the endurance of someone for whom life is not easy. The Pederson’s show will remain at the U.I.C.A. until February 15.