Noah James Saunders

‘Wire and Shadow - Portraits of Poems’ is a series of portraits, rendered in galvanized steel wire, each portrait is mounted in front of a 5’ x 5’ white square, displayed prominently beside a poem - from Lyon Street by California poet Marc Zegans.

‘Wire and Shadow - Portraits of Poems’ was created to engage. Suspended midair with their concave side facing out towards the audience, the eyes of these wire portraits catch and follow the viewer's gaze - no matter how far to one side they move. This deliberate interaction captures the viewer's attention, inspiring them to slow down, stop, and truly look. 

Once engaged, the viewer is handed a “BigBlue” flashlight. When shone upon the wire sculpture, it casts a crisp shadow portrait that remains perfectly legible even in a brightly lit gallery. Here the engagement deepens. Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned to sculpt the cast shadows of my wire portraits to hold a vast universe of raw emotion. These shadows are extraordinarily sensitive to subtle alterations of the light; as the viewer raises and lowers their arm, the expressions in the shadow portrait shifts dramatically—sometimes revealing emotions entirely opposite to those held in the steel wire portrait itself.  

With light in hand, the viewer discovers these fleeting expressions, pausing over a shadow portrait that deeply resonates, and sharing what they have illuminated with those around them. By creating this visual dialogue between wire and shadow, the viewer transforms into a co-creator. 

And what of the poems? ‘Wire and Shadow - Portraits of Poems’ are not merely portraits of people; they are portraits of the individual poems itself! As the viewer reads the poem displayed next to each wire portrait, they begin to understand this work as a piece of Reverse Ekphrasis. While the steel wire portrait fully inhabits the meaning behind the stanza that serves as its title, the cast shadow has been deliberately sculpted to express all the text’s surrounding emotions. In the same spirit that ekphrasis poetry uses language to describe art, this installation uses physical and ephemeral form to map the emotional universe of a poem, capturing complex emotions describing those complex times of San Francisco in the 1970’s and ‘80’s.

The last act of engagement is when our now co-creator passes the light to a fellow viewer…   

*If you enjoy reading Marc Zegans' poems you can purchase his book that inspired the series here: Lyon Street

A New Series Of Wire Portraits and Their Inspiration

In spring of 2022 I completed En Vie - a wire portrait eight feet by six feet; the largest, most complex sculpture I have ever created. Looking into En Vie’s eyes, I could only think, what next? What could possibly come after this?

Creatively exhausted, I spent weeks in my studio looking around the space. Finding a postcard from an art show I did twenty years earlier, I began to ponder the trajectory of my life with wire. I could remember how I felt as a young artist - that insatiable desire to create - a desire so stifled by fear. I remembered a series of sculptures I had then so wished to create, and the fear that stopped me from fulfilling this desire.

I set the card down, and with a raised eyebrow, I asked my younger and my present self: Is it not possible now?

Looking back into the eyes of En Vie, I understood. En Vie worked so well because I had discovered the power that came with marrying the size of a wire portrait to a specific gauge or thickness of wire - thin enough to allow me to infuse the face with emotion, not so thin as to bend under its own weight. Twenty years ago I worked exclusively with 18 gauge wire, no matter the size of the portrait. I had seen portrait after portrait fail from trying to force a line that was too thick to hold the delicate emotions I so wanted to convey. This simple insight fully opened my creative universe.

I began to gather images of models but felt something was missing. If this was to be a series, I realized I needed an emotional well from which to draw, not simply images. I needed a story arc to unify the series. Turns out that the emotional well I needed was in my mailbox! My friend and poet Marc Zegans had mailed me his latest book Lyon Street - a book of poems about coming of age in San Francisco in the ‘70’s and the early ‘80’s. A book in which his wiser self speaks with his younger self. It could not have been a more perfect inspiration!

As I read Marc’s verse, certain words really spoke to me - 'as I catch and throw him to the salt'... 'tonight, I turn and remember'... 'I ignore him and break'... 'a thin line of love tethering you to shore'... ‘no plans of moving on. You look out’

I was amazed at how easy it was to marry Zegans’s poetic lines to models I keep in my files. Each stanza that moved me had its own precise set of needs. Some required only a face staring out. Others wanted more, an arm, even a tattoo to round out the meaning embodied in the chosen string of words. Over the next twelve months my studio began to fill with diverse personalities. The wire portrait series, that I had dreamed up in my youth, was coming to life.

After much meditation I named this series: “Wire and Shadow - Portraits of Poems.”