This collaboration between Maine poet Dawn Potter and Sarasota painter and architect Kathy Wright was completed in February 2021.

Dawn’s statement: The poem we chose for the broadside is the last in a series of fourteen Accident Sonnets written between January 6 and January 21, 2021—a particularly fraught period of American political unrest and uncertainty. Most of the other sonnets deal with the dread and sadness associated with this moment in history, as they affected one person’s everyday, local world. The final sonnet makes a shift toward hope and renewal.

Kathy’s statement: The painting emerges from repetitive applications of paint across multiple sessions. From our first conversation I was struck by Dawn’s fascination with the 14 line sonnet as a literary device, describing its effectiveness both historically as well as within her own practice. The painting began with a series of black and white lines, horizontal trajectories across the space of the canvas which were then worked over and through with passes of color and gesture of varying degrees of opacity until, finally, a composition presents itself, a complete composition which, in its wholeness still manages to occupy a pensive space vacillating somewhere between resolution and becoming.