Edge States: Inner Landscapes Outside is an exhibition of watercolor paintings and artist’s
books by Amy Fleischer, presented alongside poems by Anna M. Warrock
Drawn to travel in far-away places, Fleischer has explored remote regions of the United
States, India, Norway, and Scotland—many of which are depicted in her paintings and artist’s
books. Through the lens of these striking landscapes, Fleischer examines enduring aspects of
the human condition. Likening horizons to cell membranes, she calls on the rich variety of
edges in each place as a source of metaphor for the complexly shifting borderlands of
interpersonal relationships. Contrasting the diffuse edges of misty mountains with more
structurally defined rooftops, Fleischer’s landscapes draw on the material qualities of each
place to depict what is shared between people.
Warrock’s poems also feature a geographical sensibility in part by exploring the pathos and
radical reorientation that accompanies loss. She holds that “grief is a continent the grieving
must travel through” and also uses horizons as a gateway in moving toward inner landscapes.
Amy Fleischer is a multidisciplinary artist who studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at
Sarah Lawrence College in New York. After growing up landlocked in Nashville, she lived for
several years in Seattle, where she worked as a cook on a sailboat and taught people how to
make books when she was on land. While pursuing a graduate degree in occupational therapy,
she was awarded a LCC Fellowship Grant from the Somerville Arts Council.
Anna M. Warrock’s poems have been set to music and also permanently installed in a Boston area
subway station. Publications include the chapbooks Horizon and Smoke and Stone, and
the anthology Kiss Me Goodnight, Poems and Stories by Women Who Were Girls When Their
Mothers Died, a Minnesota Book Award finalist, as well as poems in numerous journals. She
has been awarded both Somerville Arts Council Literature Fellowships and Project Grants.
Lis Weiss is a poet who teaches writing and literature at Salem State University and has a MFA
from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She has taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing
homes, as well as to people with intellectual disabilities. Her award-winning poems have
appeared in multiple journals. She recently ran a writing workshop on material culture and
thing theory and plans to run another on writing the sea, exploring the ocean as metaphor.
This program is supported in part by a grant from the
Somerville Arts Council, a local agency supported by the
Massachusetts Cultural Council.