Married by both metaphor and law, Tom and Lisa Dowling have collaborated to produce hybrid artworks that melt the lines between painting, sculpture and poetry.

Tom, an artist who has actively exhibited in the art world for the last 40 years, has integrated Lisa’s poetry into the bodies of his paintings, sculptures, and onto vessels to produce a new union of image and metaphor.A multi-published poet, Lisa has created books, altarpieces, and textiles the carry Tom’s images and designs along with her words. Together they have forged a marriage and a creative life that has enhanced a layered partnership between the arts.

Images need words to give them life, a real presence and form. The two cannot exist without each other: form and its definition, figure and its explanatory function, fallible object and its corresponding symbol.The marriage of art and poetry has always been tenuous, too difficult to merge without somehow diminishing the value of each entity. Our challenge was to integrate the two genres into artwork that seems amplified by the union, not compromised.

Painting, sculpture, and poetry all too often are so complex on their own that their multiplication can lead to overload. Our goal is to somehow arrive at reduction after addition: a sparseness and elegance that is rich with metaphor.

Tom and Lisa Dowling, 2005