Visual Work — Leah Souffrant

This is a small sampling of my visual art. Often transferring inked words onto a monochrome paint surface, I consider how we piece together the significance of words and images — in the news, in poems, in art, in conversation — even when they are incomplete. I’ve long been interested in language’s limitations and possibilities. In my book "Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable" (2017) and in other essays and poems, I've written on the unsayable and on the messy entanglement of experience, perception, and understanding. Turning to visual art, I invite new and related questions: How does material, visual work convey and provoke the poetic mind at work? What can art tell us about language and perception that words alone cannot say?

What If We’re All Wrong, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas bd, 8x10”

Strange Light, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas 11x14, private collection

[untitled] acrylic and ink transfer on canvas, 16x20

Do You Want, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas, 9x12”

Pandemic Series 4, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas bd, 5x7”

Still.Life 2020, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas bd, 5X7” [private collection]

hope, or something, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas, 8x10”

Figure 2, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas, 12x12”

Neighbors, acrylic and ink transfer on canvas panel, 8X10 [private collection]

[Untitled, 3000 questions series], acrylic on paper, 8x10 mounted [private collection]

Read A More Visceral Sense of Language’s Limitations, a conversation about poetry and art in Speak the Magazine (2021).