PROVINCETOWN – Lauren Wolk and Jackie Reeves have known each other for years from the Cape Cod art scene.
Reeves is an award-winning visual artist who has shown her innovative paintings extensively in the Cape Cod region and beyond.
Wolk is an acclaimed novelist and poet in addition to being a visual artist and a former art center administrator.
On December 16, Jackie Reeves emailed Lauren Wolk an animation she had put together, showing the process she used in creating a new artwork. She wanted to know if Wolk had a poem that might work as spoken word over the animation.
Lauren got right to work, creating a new poem to go with the animation.
“She sent me a wonderful animation of artwork and asked if I had a poem to go with it. I wrote one and added music,” Wolk said.
Reeves said, Wolk sent it back very quickly: a voiceover of her reading the new poem along with music to go with the animation.
“The voiceover fit so well with the animation, the timing of the words and the music,” Reeves said.
Jackie Reeves and Lauren Wolk in front of the iconic “Art” sign in Provincetown.
That was the start of what they call, The InkLine Project.
Since then, they have been going back and forth, Reeves creating animations and Wolk writing poetry to go with it, for the past six months.
For each animation, Reeves uses the artist app Procreate on her iPad, which records the artist’s process.
Using this unedited animation created by the app, they add Wolk’s voice reading poetry she has written in response to the animation.
Both artists, Wolk said, are creating “equally spontaneously.”
“It is a raw and unfiltered process,” she said and for her, that is part of the appeal.
As an artist and writer, Wolk said, “many things go on for years,” citing planning for exhibits, writing books, etc.
“This is really immediate. It’s so refreshing,” Wolk said.
Over the past six months, they have created 27 of the collaborations.
They have combined five of them for a short film called The Art of Survival: A Visual Poetry Film.
The short is showing at this week’s Provincetown International Film Festival as part of the New England Shorts series, showing Friday at 11am and Sunday at 4pm.
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