Artist statement and definition: visku
Visku (visual-ku) is a term coined by Cherie Hunter Day in 2022 as intermedia which contains text possessing some of the attributes of haiku, such as brevity, disjunction, etc. Cherie writes, “I see visku as more of a trunk in the [visual poetry] hallway. It is primarily visual and may use features of these other forms, but it maintains some aspects of haiku—a reference to nature, discrete units that act as language elements [mora] without actually forming words, movement from element to element. It’s different from haiga, which is more text-based.”
Artist statement for her black & white collages
Cherie writes:
The source for the black and white etchings is The Complete Encyclopedia of Illustration by J. G. Heck (Park Lane division of Crown Publishers, Inc., 1979.) It is based on the 1851 edition of The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science Literature and Art.
These images have traversed four separate methods of reproduction—two wet processes and two dry processes. The intaglio etching (1851) and commercial lithography (1979) are printed in ink on paper. I used a photocopier to copy the images (2004). Xerography is a dry process using static electricity to deposit charged particles (toner) on paper. I cut out the image copies to create new arrangements and paste them on paper—another wet step, which is part of the creation but not the reproduction. The final iteration is to scan them using a flatbed scanner (camera with lenses and mirrors) to create a digital file of pixels (Joint Photographic Experts Group or JPEG) (2021).