Kickstarter

Dear Friends,

If this is our first meeting, you may not know that I am a poet & interdisciplinary artist currently working out of Eugene, Oregon, and I’ve been selected for a residency at the Arteles Creative Center in Hämeenkyrö, Finland, for October of 2012.

About Me
I’m the author of a chapbook recently published by dancing girl press, titled Memory of My Mouth. Other recent work can be found online at Coldfront, Ancora Imparo, or Poecology (launching August 31st). I’ve been awarded grants and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Virginia. My first full-length manuscript, Rare Earth, recently received an Honorable Mention from Coconut Books’ Cargill First Book contest.

About the Project
While in Finland, I’ll be focusing on a group of visual/Concrete poems, with the working title Fun With Binary Decision Diagrams, and a related mixed-media series, titled Heat Signature. Both of these series center around ideas of tracing or exploring the ‘signatures’ left by human action—whether on the landscape or an individual. 

I’m excited to focus on the visual turn in my written work while in Finland, an historic and contemporary home to visual/Concrete poetics. What’s more, the Arteles community is dedicated to innovative exhibition opportunities for residents—a new, integral frontier for my mixed media work and the visual poems.

The Nitty-Gritty
Hämeenkyrö is located in the western part of Finland, about 43 km from the city of Tampere, and 200 km from the Helsinki airport. Arteles has awarded me aid that will cover half of the residency costs for my stay, leaving me with 660 Euro (just over $820) left to cover. I’ve applied for a grant to help offset these remaining residency costs and help with airfare, but it won’t cover the total project budget which is about $3000—this figure includes the remaining residency fees, airfare, baggage/shipping fees, transportation to/from the Helsinki airport to Hämeenkyrö, project supplies, food/lodging on the road, etc.

What You Can Do/What You’ll Get
In exchange for your support, you will not only have my deep & abiding gratitude, but access to a variety of goodies (which are explained in more detail to the right). Artwork (whether mixed-media or poetry) will be accompanied by either a signed certificate of authenticity or signature and edition number, whichever is appropriate. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I sincerely appreciate any support, all good wishes, and your visit to this project site.

If You Want/Need More, Thoughts from Lisa Russ Spaar:

the white heat signatures of Zayne Turner

You see, it’s the build past brink
that is inevitable;
bonanza is born only
of borrascas. As such,

the human shrapnel
spans generations—

        -Zayne Turner, from “Aeolian Process”

*

As she works art’s delirious hem—the borders of linguisitic and visual grammars—making raids back and forth between utterable and unutterable conditions,  Zayne Turner astonishes the reader with her capacity to bring seemingly contradictory states of being into a frisson of articulated intuition. Intertextual, collaged, theatrical, polyphonic, stereoscopic, political, environmental, righteous, daring, questioning, erotic—there is no mode beyond her imaginative range, and no territory of voice or place into which Turner is afraid to make her quicksilver, hybrid forays, conceptually and in praxis. A topographer/cartographer, armed with the packing tape of her peripatetic life as poet, visual artist, and performer, Turner, though young, shows (and heartens) us, by her prodigious and empathetic innovation, that we are far from reaching the material limits of language as it is new-minted in her restless vision. 

At last,
Additional images from the “Heat Signature” series (and links to other published poetry) can be found at Literary/Arts, my online workspace.