Genevieve Sachs

I am a writer and printmaker with a focus on text art and visual poetry. My text-based work takes form through graphite drawings, bookbinding, and an array of printmaking processes primarily including intaglio, cyanotypes, and relief printing.

My hybrid poetry imagines a symbiosis between nostalgia and guilt in order to understand how a Catholic upbringing has contributed to my notions of self within the context of contemporary womanhood. During this past year of isolation and chaos, in which I have not been able to escape my singularity, my poetry has focused on the sudden compulsion to constantly identify proof of my existence, as if checking to ensure my own shadow is still there. I observe the physical traces I’ve left, impacts I’ve made, trail markers of my own validity. After feeling so out of touch with myself and the world around me, perhaps it is my way of regaining contact.

When translating text—mine or others’—to visual art, each of the methods I employ ultimately shares the outcome of distorting the original text and hindering its legibility. By doing this, I strip the words down to study their pure visual form, reassigning emphasis from their content to their appearance as images. Disguising the text that’s present and visible in the work gives me the power to regulate how much of the original sentiment is hidden or revealed—an ongoing back-and-forth between control and vulnerability.

Genevieve makes her residence in Can Serrat during October 2021