The Heart Is A Drowning Object

The Heart Is A Drowning Object is a collaboration in poems and paintings by the novelist Katherine Vaz and the artist Isabel Pavão. Both are known to international audiences.


These artists have found inspiration in a female solitude that living through grief might bring. Katherine Vaz’s melodic poems begin with an actual damaged heart in a love story—a husband with a sudden affliction, a wife who tends to him. Isabel Pavão’s vibrant pictures share and explore her colorations of grief. Their words and images grow together, in an unexpected bloom of joy, into a way of recognizing late love amid the real possibility of loss.


Artist’s Proof Editions offers their collaboration as a multi-touch artist’s book. The reader may enlarge and examine the painter’s multi-media art in detail. She may listen to the writer’s voice while reading her poems. In the opening video poem, the poet and the artist, performing together, become twinned with glorious imagery, in their evocation of longing and reunion.


Some comments about the artists:



“Katherine Vaz is the sort of fiction writer who makes me wonder why the rest of us even bother…. Her work has a delicious sadness to it that I couldn’t quite define until I visited Lisbon. The Portuguese have this emotion they call ‘saudade,’ a sort of beautiful longing…. It brings to mind what Toni Morrison says in the dedication to Sula about the ‘sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.’ It’s the textured sadness that comes from love.” —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, Silver Sparrow, Leaving Atlanta



“Isabel Pavão’s spaces are foundations for dreams. Visions well up from an ultramarine background. They are sometimes floral, they turn this way or that remembering a face. Here are roses that burst forth with blossoming charm. Elsewhere, veins run over the space like ribs of the world. Breathing and impulsiveness. Breaking off and slow eruption.” —Yves Peyre, “Meeting in the Utopia of Certainty,” accompanying text to the solo exhibition “10 Impressions of Rose and Sea,” Pagine D’Art Editions, Paris 2017