In a time when meaningful global communication and intelligent restructuring of our environment is imperative, art can assume an important role. It can offer skillful and benign problem solving and communicate expressions of human values through its metaphors.
In works like Poetry Walk the essence of great minds and ideas are rescued from sinking into dusty memory by being brought into present relevance and fruitful use. Human values expressed with a passion create a lasting impact, they enlighten, motivate and inspire. By uniting different times and disciplines separated by specialization, a new powerful overview appears and young minds are given a chance to see anew. The writers and philosophers I have selected for Poetry Walk speak my words, lament my laments and dream my dreams. They are there forever to speak to us all. The carved granites with their high polish reflect the swaying branches of trees and people. As they lie in the ground surrounded by green grass or brown soil the stones resemble pools of moving water with the words floating on top. The edges of the stones have been chopped to resemble excavations.
Poetry Walk is a gift to Thomas Jefferson's university and its students to make them reflect, be encouraged to affect change, and perhaps see the world in a better light. I believe that artistic vision, image and metaphor are powerful tools of communication that can become expressions of human values with profound impact on our consciousness and collective destiny. I was asked to include my Manifesto from 1970 that announced my commitment to a new art form whose ideals served others, not the self.
Poets & philosophers carved into the stone include: e.e. cummings, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Gustave Flaubert, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leo Tolstoy, Indira Ghandi, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, Francis Bacon, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, etc.
© Copyright Agnes Denes
working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving
to create beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns
desiring to know the importance or insignificance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream
persisting in the eternal search
© l970 Agnes Denes