Fertile Ground

A Collaboration by Karen Laudon and Emilie Lindemann

For over a year, we (Madison-based visual artist Karen Laudon and Manitowoc area poet Emilie Lindemann) have been working on a collaboration around the idea of "home" that we’ve titled Fertile Ground. The following three poems and images are part of this larger project. The creative work in Fertile Ground questions the way we interact with our space—where we feel most protected, supported, and safe—even during times of political upheaval and in this age of climate collapse. How might art, poetry, and collaboration create a sort of home in such times?

Living in different parts of the state, our collaborative process is open-ended, with Emilie sending Karen poems in response to images of works in progress Karen has emailed, or vice versa. Conversations percolate around these exchanges and inform Karen’s work in the studio as well as Emilie’s work on the page. 

Karen’s painting process is largely intuitive and involves pouring, pooling, the building up and scraping down of paint until surface and image coalesce. This process inspired Emilie to revisit her poems for the collaboration, using erasure to create gaps that the reader must work to fill in—similarly to how the viewer engages with Karen’s abstract paintings. Early in the collaboration, Emilie realized that so many of her poems for this project concluded with questions and even felt the impulse to apologize for this. As the creative dialogue continued, we’ve embraced gaps, layers, and questions as a feature of the project.      

Karen says that Emilie's poems, and the collaborative process itself, feed into this body of work, as does working in Karen’s native gardens which have become the heart of her home. Natural processes of growth and decay; accretion and erosion; birth, death, and rebirth are reflected in Karen’s working process. Both Emilie and Karen spend significant time in quiet awareness with nature. For Emilie, there are woods right outside her door in rural Manitowoc County. During the collaboration, she also became very aware of the Linden tree outside her bedroom window, imagining this tree as a sort of roommate or family member. For Karen, there's a semi-wild corridor along the Starkweather Creek where she walks almost daily. These poems and paintings are also extensions of our sense of "home," offering feelings of belonging, grace, and respite.

Three Poems by Emilie Lindemann

Three Paintings by Karen Laudon

Emilie Lindemann is the author of Ghost(ed) Woman & the Electric Purple Pants (Fresh Water Press, 2025). These poems are part of a collaboration with Madison-based visual artist Karen Laudon. Emilie holds a PhD in English-Creative Writing from UW Milwaukee and teaches at Lakeshore College. She lives on a dairy farm in Wisconsin with her husband, son, and border collie.

Karen Laudon was born and raised in Wisconsin, where a childhood divided between Milwaukee, a nearby lake cabin, and her grandparents' dairy farm afforded formative experiences for her work. She completed her BFA and MFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, working and exhibiting in the Bay Area for sixteen years. Now living and working in Madison, Laudon has exhibited at regional galleries and colleges, as well as nationally.  Laudon's work is rooted in nature, the figure, and poetry, for both inspiration and structure.