Adrienne Wooster

I am a Providence-based artist, writer, and Roger Williams University graduate. In my work I try to embrace what William Wordsworth calls “the light of common day” — It’s impossible to make it through life unscathed or undistracted by the rush of daily obligations, insecurities and aspirations. Yet, in the quieter hours, I find myself thinking about how we are only here, in ourselves, this space, this moment, so briefly — it is, indeed, all we ever have until we go wherever it is we go next. But, until then, I’d like to live everything — to hear the bass of the car radio in my chest, the roll of laughter in conversation, to smell the sun on the sidewalk, or to see the way it hits my window in morning... In this way, I think, the gray of passing days can still be viewed with childlike wonder, yet with the sobering retrospect that things go forward — that the new becomes familiar, but beauty is there if you look, and memory is the stardust that shoots out of the blackhole that is grief. And we take this weight, and we get on. I make art and I write because I need to. James Baldwin said it best in Sonny's Blues, "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."