Amaranth Borsuk contributes to an artistic game of Telephone

Amaranth Borsuk recently published a piece in to Telephone, an artists’ game in which contributors are sent an anonymous work of art and asked to create work in response. Their work is then sent anonymously to another contributor who works in a different medium, leading to a network of artists getting inspired by one another’s work, which is published freely online.

In addition to the website, which includes “1,395 individual, interconnected and original works by artists from 930 cities in 65 countries,” Nathan Langston and the other organizers have set up exhibitions of the included works in galleries around the world, including one at Seattle’s Base Camp Studios opening on Friday October 10.

Borsuk wrote her poem, “Wax Cylinder” in response to a painting by Erin de Burca, an Irish artist living in Spain, whom she has never met. Of her participation in the project, Borsuk writes,

“I love the idea of art as a gift given without expectation of return—a source of inspiration to the recipient to, one hopes, make work of their own. I have made gift-giving a central aspect of my recent teaching and creative practice, inspired, in part, by my reading of Barbara Browning’s novel The Gift. My students’ work inspires me with its mystery and energy when it has an intended audience of one—intimate, strange, and charged with possibility. These poems, stories, artworks, and experiences invite us into relation. They are acts of generosity and connection. This is what I am looking for right now, and I’m so glad Telephone gave me the chance to reach outward.”

View Amaranth’s poem and explore the artistic game of telephone online.