Meet the 2023 Fellows: Audrey Parks
Published on July 28, 2023. Interview by 2023 Summer Intern, Rachel McGinnis.
Audrey Parks (she/her) is a poet, DJ, dogsitter, vegetable seller, and the assistant manager and buyer at New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville. During her 2023 New City Arts Fellowship, Audrey asked: “What’s inside of me? What am I inside of? What’s happening?” Using psychogeography and somatic poetry rituals, Audrey crafted poems around the locus of “soft spot.”
First, the most important question: What food would you reach for first in a food fight and why?
Cotton Candy! It wouldn’t hurt anyone and would dissolve easily. Also, it doesn’t seem like a bad food to waste.
How did you interpret the theme “soft spot” and how do you see it realized in what you’ve produced for this exhibition?
A "soft spot" is a place, and every place invites us to consider psychogeography. What's inside of me, and what am I inside of? How does what's "within" us interact with what's "around" us? How is the body a place for poetry, and how is poetry a place for the body?
How do we pay attention, and notice where our attention is leading us? What is tangible and what is intangible? In crafting these poems, I interpreted an infrastructure of Phase (I'm going through something), Threshold (something's going through me), Alignment (I'm going through something and something's going through me), and Transmission (here we go).
Emotionally, a "soft spot" holds space for something unsettled and unsettling. Is that a lump in your throat or are you just happy to see me?
Artistically, these poems wanted to play with prepositions. They also wanted an enclosure: each line begins and ends with the same letter.
How would you describe your experience as an Artist Fellow with New City Arts?
A dream come true! Thanks to the team at New City Arts and Visible Records for inviting me in.
How has Charlottesville impacted your artistic work and life as an artist?
I grew up in Charlottesville, and my parents and grandparents did as well. My family creates art in their own ways: through gardening, nurturing, quilting, teaching, and more. I think everyone makes art somehow. I'm so grateful that there are people in Charlottesville who recognize and foster creativity, and who actively dismantle systems that stand in the way of everyone's participation in art-making. I've experienced "Charlottesville" as a baby, a college student, an athlete, a bookseller, a tenant, a dogsitter, an awkward middle schooler, an angsty teen, an assistant manager, someone angry, someone down in the dumps, someone in love, and so many identities in between. The art has always been there, and I have loved it forever!
What motivates you to produce art?
I think making art is so funny! Where do poems come from? What I intend to produce is rarely what emerges, and what emerges always teaches me something new. Am I practicing towards chaos or precision?
How do your other interests and responsibilities influence your art?
I feel so grateful to work in a bookshop where poetry is honored! In my spare time, deejaying helps me process themes and ideas, and pet sitting is an exercise in care and compassion.
What have you learned about yourself as a person through the experience of making art?
Through making art, I’ve learned that I’m going to be okay. Poetry helps me open those important portals of community care, self-awareness, and universal love. It’s the one consistent practice that I can enter no matter what else is happening.
The New City Arts Fellowship creates space, time, and financial support for Charlottesville-area artists to make work in response to an annual open call and proposal theme. At the conclusion of the fellowship, work created by each Artist Fellow is presented in a group exhibition. This year’s theme is entitled Soft Spot by Marisa Williamson. This open call invited artists to consider the ways their work reveals unseen openings, sites of ongoing growth, unfused structures, and delicate parts that require gentleness and care. Artists spent their creative fellowship developing their interpretations of their soft spots, and shared the products of that work in the group exhibition.
