Intention. Improvisation. Accident. All three of these are guiding influences in Sally Van Doren’s lyrical work. An award-winning poet, Van Doren seeks to create connections among words, images and poetic constructs. Her paintings, drawings, prints and poems arise from the same source: thousands of pages of illegible handwriting, also known as asemic drawing. While exploring the potential of written language as art, her work employs an expanding personal iconography of calligraphic gestures, letters, geometric forms and design motifs. In layers of interactive media, these marks engage in a dialogue fundamental to a poet’s intimacy with text and an artist’s fascination with line, color and form.

 

“Tangled Language” is Van Doren’s first solo exhibition at Furnace-Art on Paper Archive. She has also had solo shows at Longview Gallery in St. Louis and the Cornwall Library and been in group shows at Furnace and Five Points Gallery in Torrington CT. Her ongoing written and visual text, “The Sense Series,” was part of a multi-media installation performance at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Her art appears on the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022), and the covers of two of her four books of poetry, Promise (LSU Press 2017) and Sibilance (forthcoming in Fall 2023.) She has been the featured artist in The Nashville Review, December, and 2RiverView and her work is held in distinguished private and corporate collections. Her poetry has been widely published nationally and internationally in journals such as American Poet, Boulevard, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The New Republic and Southwest Review. Her poetry collection, Sex at Noon Taxes, received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets.

 

A St. Louis native, Van Doren holds a BA from Princeton in Comparative Literature, and an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has taught poetry at the 92^nd Street Y, Washington University and other public and private educational institutions. She works from her studio in West Cornwall CT.