The Camp House Gallery | Chattanooga, TN | Summer 2023
A collaborative show featuring the artwork of Darcie Denton and the poetry of David Denton.
Darcie's Artist Statement:
This body of work is a story, an exploration, and a conversation between my dad’s poetry and my visual art.
The story we follow, laid out in words and visuals, is that of anyone who experiences loneliness and isolation within themselves, and how we make peace with that and find a home in this transient world. The easiest box to get trapped in is that of one’s own mind. What keeps us there may be anything from feelings of unworthiness to a fear of being misunderstood even if we do reach out.
As I created visual work for this show, I thought of how different my relationship with my father is now from when I was a child. Back then, connection and conversation were taken for granted:
“He’s my dad, he loves me no matter what, and that’s all that matters.”
This is still true. But now as two adults, the dynamic has changed. I want to understand him more and to have him understand me. Though we live separately, I don’t want distance to grow between us. On my end, this show was an exploration into that dynamic. In reading his poetry, I get a better view into my dad’s humanity. I see his struggles and insecurities, many of which I feel with him. But how does a daughter, growing out of the child-parent dynamic, move into the space where these honest conversations with her father can exist? This body of work displays one way these two deep-feeling introverts can have conversations that matter.
This show explores vulnerability and poetry in the written and the visual. It explores the liminality we experience in our journey through life and emotion. It explores the complexity of silence and what can be found there - both isolation and healing. Above all, it invites the viewer to explore the deeper places of their minds and those of the ones they love.
– Darcie
David's Artist Statement:
When I was in high school, I was (or felt I was, which comes to the same thing) an outsider. I felt perpetually out of place. I identified myself mostly by my differences from others— how we dressed, where we lived, what we drove. Whatever I brought to the table always seemed inferior and therefore I viewed myself as inferior, as less than.
The first hint I had that I might have something positive to contribute came from my English teacher, Ora Mae Kirk. She published a little book every year of her students’ poetry and short prose, and she would award prizes to the students who won for best contributions. I won first for one of my poems. That started me down a path of creative writing that lasted through college, until the challenges of simply living diverted me from the hobby.
Twenty-five years later, during a rather dull and challenging time in my life, I turned again to (metaphorically) pen and paper and began to process my struggles and doubts, pain and progress, through my poetry. I write of loneliness and loss, my own and others; I write also of hope and aspiration. But mostly, I think, I write of the journey of my life, from brokenness, through healing, to wholeness and home. To the extent that the reader can identify with and relate to my experience, to that extent this poetry can fulfill its larger purpose. I write for me. You read for you. And a poem‘s not fully written until it’s read.
– David
