Welcome to OBSERVATIONS by Mimi Peterson.

I am honored to be Racine’s newest Writer-In-Residence #17.

Thank you Art Root for your advocacy of the Arts and Humanities; your support of the WIR program; your positive influence throughout Racine.

Thank you to the inspiring – and aspiring – creative community.

Each week while I occupy the WIR platform, OBSERVATIONS will present thematic materials to make meaning out of the relational aesthetics between words and images. During this period I will reflect on my work, fully aware that words and images have become increasingly indistinct during the socio-politico atmosphere of the 2024 presidential election campaign.

The OBSERVATIONS audience can accept, resist, or negotiate what they read and see, depending on how it suits what they know of the world and what is imagined.  I intend to cultivate an audience keen on discovering new concepts, to rediscover the unknown, as in the Other, to recover the notion that creatives are cultural ambassadors.

OBSERVATIONS #1
Call - Bus Poems Contest
          THEPOETRYMOVEMENT.ORG
          Nickolas M. Ravnikar
          Director/Producer, WIR #15
          July 26, 2024, Open Mic
Response - Poetry Stop
          Mimi Peterson
          Writer-in-Residence #17
          July 30, 2024, Opening Up

Poetry Stop

The new, old Transit Center on State,
Now an unambiguous Poetry Stop, 
Serves as shelter, hosts spatial and temporal scenes,
Words on a line, blank intervals in between,
Static marks on pages, ideas suspended in air, 
Material intimacy, multiplicity, performed here.

Poets move ideas, speak of literacy,
Confuse and subvert the language,
Use as weapon or shield, 
Choreograph the elements, reveal mental dances,
Feel to think beyond surrounding space,
An argument to be made - poets are mediums.

Nickolas M.R., driving the moment,
Conveyed his jargon in an off-schedule way,
Our motors running, poets kept it coming,
Performers and audience, one and the same,
Open up at the mic, listen to be heard.

Busing got some travelers to their destination,
Others had no ticket,
Confabbing at the terminal,
Words, gestures, music, dance,
N.M.R's Poetry Movement,
Unique in wants and needs,
An omnibus evening,
A Universe any body can enter,
Except - green snap peas.                                       mp 7/28/24

About Mimi Peterson

I channel geo-culturalism into word and object assemblage whose concepts are inspired by the people and places that I have lived – Racine, a Post-Industrial Wisconsin city, progressive Chicago, rural Michigan, the sand dunes of Indiana – each hugging Lake Michigan.

… by the schools attended – School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MAAE), University of Illinois (BFA), University of Mexico, D.F., University of Madrid, Spain – each supplying indigenous materials found in the wilderness of man, nature, urbanism.

… by acts of improvisation turned into concepts of hybridization, the alchemical outcome, of continual transition and coupling of elements that differ from one another, coming together to form the next hybrid – each a dimensional continuum.

About the Work

Characteristics of my writing and visual art echo the organic origins of its conception. The process can tend to be unpredictable and speak to the effects of time and space. My intuitive approach promotes a sense of movement, either implied or real, that pervades my work. The evolving process can begin with a word, a drawing, a color, or material to trigger the conscious mind to access the ideas and images that develop within the unconscious.

Scribbled images in my notebooks recall the methods of the Surrealists who attempted to produce works that emanated directly from the unconscious, like automatic writing. By allowing fragments from my imagination to take form, my creative projects purposefully exploit our collective memory and history.

An important aspect of my work lies in communicating feelings. Working spontaneously allows methods and media to be fluid. I build sentences from signs and symbols and sculptures from fragmented objects, often connoting growth and movement – a metaphor for change. They prompt an instinct to preserve the ephemeral beauty in nature and awaken questions of permanency in the human scheme of things.

The stuff of abstract ideas, organic found objects and synthetic debris are emblematic of the clutter of memory, of nonspecific feelings, and a reminder to cherish that which is magical and unexplained.

More OBSERVATIONS are coming Saturday, August 10