Article addresses collaborative work with Associate Professor of Art Mollie Oblinger

“To the Quarry, Together,” a first-person account by poet C. Kubasta about the collaborative work between her and Ripon College Associate Professor of Art Mollie Oblinger, is featured in the Spring 2017 magazine of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters.

Kubasta is the author the chapbooks, A Lovely Box and &s, and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless. She is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and serves as assistant poetry editor with Brain Mill Press.

Oblinger’s artwork investigates the environment. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at Furman University in South Carolina and Sierra College in California.

“When poets and visual artists work together, they negotiate a shared language,” Kubasta writes. “In collaboration, they explore how their work, well, works together: both engage with form and shape, utilize symbolic thought, and explore metaphor of various kinds. Materials change and mutate in the hands of artists, and often come to their final forms after many revisions and drafts, possible versions begun and set aside. Art exists in the friction—the frisson—between idea and making, in the often never-fully-complete translation between the inception of an idea (which is always perfect because it’s unmade) and the fruition of that idea. It’s a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle that calls us back to the blinking screen, the empty table, the blank wall.”