Kristina Erny

Black Feather: Mixed Media

Overhead the Sky: Mixed Media

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Artist Statement

These broadsides are an obsession of mine. These two were created using an accumulative method starting with watercolor, then adding forms to complete the composition in oil pastel, India ink, and then text. The text on each of them comes from two poems in my debut collection of poetry, Elijah Fed by Ravens (Solum Literary Press). "Black Feather" features lines from the title poem. Both works explore the tension of living in the body and of having a spirit and a soul. As Richard Rohr writes in his work Everything Belongs, "the biblical human is clearly tripartite." Lucille Clifton says that poems (artmaking) are her "way of living in the world" - it is the same for this artist. There are delineations in both works which hint at separation and distance and longing, but there is softness too, a calling out, and a reaching from self to spirit, spirit to soul, soul to God. Body, spirit, and soul are experienced simultaneously, brought to clarity in moments of great suffering and moments of great love. "We bear the mystery of God" (Rohr). 

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Kristina Erny (she/her) is a third-culture poet and visual artist who grew up in South Korea. She is the author of Elijah Fed by Ravens (Solum Literary Press, 2023) and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her poems and art have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, Blackbird, Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, and elsewhere. A lifelong expatriate, she currently teaches high schoolers literature, creative writing, and drama in Shanghai, China.