Kelly Cass Falzone

 

For over thirty-five years my primary art practice and interest was the study and writing of poems; I love the spilling – and subsequent pruning – of language, the wrestling with how words work on the tongue and the page. Five years ago, however, following the deaths of my father and mother, I found myself avoiding poetry both as a writer and reader, instead feeling drawn into a more silent form of artmaking. A longtime lover of books and paper, and possessing the sewing and carpentry skills taught to me by my mother and father respectively, I jumped at a fortuitous opportunity to take some book binding classes at University School of Nashville. It was just the buoy I needed in that dark year of repair – a wordless folding and unfolding, a ragged tearing-out and focused sewing-up. My making mirrored my grieving, the hours allowing me to drop down into a pre-language state of being, primitive and sensory, an almost underwater living.

The years since have been an extremely important time of listening and transition for me – losing my parents, launching my only son, measuring my marriage and, this year, turning fifty – and my studio practice of intuitive play and urge-following has provided a joyful way of contemplating the sadness and change happening in my life. That I have now come back around to incorporating some written language into my work suggests to me that I am embracing that which connects me to others, a sort of rope with which I can ferry myself back and forth between the wide-awake world and the underwaterness of my grief.

 

Kelly Cass Falzone, an award-winning poet, teaching artist, and Master’s level counselor, facilitates creative writing workshops throughout the community for both youth and adults. A self and community-taught artist, Kelly credits her twenty-year involvement in Nashville’s Art & Soul Studio with nurturing and challenging her exploration as a visual artist. A lifelong lover of books and paper, much of Kelly’s recent making hovers around Book Arts and Printmaking.