Ivy Raff Reading and Discussion with Clementine Zenner

The central focus of Ivy Raff's residency at Surel's Place has been revisions to her third poetry collection. The titular poem and others meditate on the slower, more internal movements - like the small water that drips on a boulder for centuries before cracking it - that define our evolving relationship to family and community, to individual and cultural bodies that live and die out. Much of the “source material” for these pieces root in her own experiences balancing her feminism and pro-Palestine activism with her Eastern European Jewish heritage and identity. Still, the questions with which this work grapples are cross-cultural. How can those of us who are more of a pariah at home than in the world outside of it find belonging in the communities we forge? The answers loop through lifetimes; our personal struggles are indeed personal, but not unprecedented. What can our culture’s forgotten past feed us, when its present seems ill-fit? How can we name ourselves as part of its future?
The collaboration with visual artist Clementine Zenner was connected from the beginning. Ivy’s initial reaction after reviewing proposals was that “Clementine's sculptural creations are fashioned from rough natural materials coated in brilliant golds and jewel tones - it's poetry! The kind I like to read and write.” Clementine felt the same connection noting in her artist's statement “This show is the result of quiet listening—to the landscape, to each other, and to the inner worlds we carry. My visual art practice, rooted in ritual, memory, and emotional alchemy, found resonance in Ivy’s evocative language. Her poetry aligns with mine as a kind of map, for the viewer, evoking responses to the shared vision.”