From silence to form
Linda Pagani, who has work at MO Gallery, on crafting her "Traces (fleeting)" monoprints
Everything flies away. And yet isn’t it still palpable? Like the imprint a first love leaves on our hearts and our bodies, felt in tender wisps years later, brought on by the scent of a rose or the glimpse of an oddly familiar stride and posture halfway down the block.
Linda Pagani’s delicate works in many mediums cradle change. They honor the shape something leaves upon us, and let it fall away before our eyes. Holding both deep attachment and transition, they’re like sand slipping through our fingers, and the tingle and rush of its touch after it’s gone. She has work on view in Caira Art Editions’ exhibition at MO Gallery in Newburyport through Feb. 13.
Traces (fleeting), the series of monoprints Linda writes about here, started with the visceral outpouring of words on paper – her journals. Realizing she didn’t want to leave a chronicle of her rawest self behind her, she burned them. As a writer with notebooks upon notebooks of my own contortions stashed away, this strikes me as both terrifying and freeing. It’s a deeply personal act of decluttering, releasing the old to make space for the new. I have a friend who did it as a cleansing ritual. Soon after, she met her now husband.
Flames and destruction are dramatic. Linda, focused on material, intangibility, and transition, attends also to the ashes, watching what had been tangles of emotion rise and fly off. Pain transformed into possibilities.
Linda sees journaling as a somatic exercise, getting emotions our of her body. It’s a silent release and self-witnessing of pain and confusion. “I still write every day. I don’t know if I’ll burn the next batch of journals. Lately, I’m wondering if letting my thoughts exist—even the ugly ones—is its own kind of release.”
There are less silent ways to do that work, when it comes time. She writes: “I’m also exploring another somatic way to purge and process: voice lessons!!”
Linda writes:
Ash, Paper, Memory, and the Quiet Act of Letting Go
by Linda Pagani
For the past decade, I have kept personal journals filled with intimate thoughts. They are written in careful cursive, a discipline ingrained early on by parochial school. Page after page, every day—just as author Julia Cameron insists in The Artist’s Way. These journals are not meant to be read by anyone else. They are my private container, a place to give voice to emotions I cannot easily express out loud, especially the negative ones: anger, resentment, grief, sorrow.
