‘FruitAndNut’ is the mother-and-daughter creative collaboration of mixed-media artist Hilary Saner (Nut) and writer and researcher Moira Peckham (Fruit).
This intriguing project falls in line, as the artists mention, with “the tradition of artist collectives that take the collaboration itself as a creative act—where the conversation produces something neither of us could make alone.”
Such endeavors can always yield highly unexpected and innovative results. Similarly, ‘FruitAndNut’ brings together abstract, nature-inspired, visually compelling paintings and collages with word collections infused with organic elements that reach straight to the heart, in what feels like a never-ending, symbiotic state of saudade—the Portuguese word for melancholy.
Glimmers of hope are the backbone tying the poetry and visual pieces together, shedding light in obscure corners, and examining nostalgia from a safe place of inner peace. If we were to describe the ongoing project briefly, it would be “fading memories.”
In Saner’s own words: “I paint the questions.” Her portfolio indeed lacks answers. Every piece of art can be understood individually, filtered through the viewer’s perspective and experience. The artworks exude sincerity and effortlessness through the use of mixed media and nostalgic, muted colors.
Saner is all about experimentation, not closing herself in one style, medium, or subject. Her works in this feature are accompanied by poetic responses by Peckham. “The poems were not written as captions or explanations, but as independent acts of looking: emotionally unedited, following the raw energies of the image wherever they led,” Saner explains.
Both artists invite us to explore the energetic charge brought by coexisting with art. For them, the creative expression is not aspirational or elitist; it is a way to encounter and process the world. Perhaps that’s why it is so soothing and refreshing to experience their art.
Contractions in the Graham Method
Moira Peckham
In this dance, we become vessels:
The Dust Bowl’s starving slope
Mirroring the concave stomach of a child
And the emptying out of old dreams.
That’s the way, the choreographer tells us,
To make room for new ones.
In this dance, our hips tuck into nothing
And our shoulders rise up like cut wings,
Luxuriating in the empty shapes between limbs
Until the music changes to a fat bass drum
And our blood arrives again to release
Our muscles into new, taut shapes.
In this dance, we must cup ourselves
Into slinky, aberrant contractions
To have and to hold for long enough
That an imaginary audience can grasp
Everything that we can’t communicate
Through speaking ourselves aloud.
In this dance, our new dreams come
On silent feet that know to leap
With controlled abandon.
It’s all a contradiction in terms,
Held snug in the negative space
We make with each aching inch of flesh.
The Darker Dark
Moira Peckham
If light passes behind me, not before
At least my back will be warm
With the faint brush of its fingers
And I can remember it after it’s gone;
Don’t ask me if I know what comes next.
For I have seen the darker dark
There beneath my own pink eyelids
One world of shadow stacked
On top of another to make it
The thing I know: the darker dark.
The darker dark doesn’t stay
And it doesn’t stay away either
Like Newton’s cradle, like a stray dog
Fed by me, flung by me
The darker dark comes back.
When it comes — and it always comes —
I find the blushing space beneath my lids
And I rest there for as long as I need to
Until the light is ready for me, and I for it;
If I leave too soon, it only hurts us both.
Before, while we wait, I curl into a flower
Right at the center, the red turns to black
And the humming of bees is muffled by the petals;
There, the darker dark keeps me fed and flung
Deep in the place where all my dreams develop.
Violent Spring
moira peckham
Without winter, I never know when I am, or where.
Nose frosted like a good martini glass
And watering eyes, I dislike this part of the rotation
Less than I hate how I lose time without it.
Hibernating through the fallow months,
Life beds down deep into greener dreams
Which gather force and rip into
The world between time’s negative spaces.
Sound marks it. With the first cracking of the ice
Comes the most intimate exposure: a notch
In the bedpost of the turning planet,
White to brown to flushing damp green—
The softness of new leaves
Is a lie told by the strengthening sun.
The budding is growth, it’s true,
But too much growth is called cancer:
Unfettered life that takes all others.
Exposed snd raw to the marrow,
Spring is the time for blood
And for meat; for dripping malice.
While the negative space slinks off
With a wheeze, the crocuses don’t care;
They are puncturing the hard earth first,
Thrusting into the hungry neighborhoods
And then into the ones that stayed full.
I ask them: how well do I love then when I know
That I can love better than this? Like the hunter
Loves to eat all that beauty, dripping red onto the snow.
Yes, spring thrusts its bayonet up like a grateful soldier
Because its innocence wants no knowledge at all,
Neither of the death it came from
Nor of the death to which it will always return.
Before and after is only silence.
Read our “Roots” issue in full
The new theme, born as usual from what the submitted works held in common, is “ROOTS.” Within its pages, we present the artworks, creativity, and inspiration of 60 visual artists and writers from 21 countries around the world. Their diverse voices come together around a shared exploration of the return to where one belongs, the invisible threads of tradition that shape identity, and the ongoing reconnection with nature, others, and oneself.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
