Posted April 8, 2026
One of the marvels of our Shared Visions projects is watching how a single image becomes a meeting place for memory, language, and music. In this fourth Chain of Inspiration, visual artist Gayle Gerson’s Bridge Impressions opens the path.
Gerson’s artistic journey began later in life, after years devoted to family and education. Since turning fully to painting and collage in 1999, she has built a nationally recognized practice rooted in experimentation and discovery. Working in watercolor, oil, and especially collage, she creates layered spaces that feel both structural and emotional, places you can cross as much as observe. Her bridges are not simply architectural; they are experiences of movement, connection, and transformation.
Colorado poet Heather Gardner responds to that invitation to cross and observe with Six Ways of Looking at a Bridge, a poem that shifts perspective with each short section, as if stepping onto the bridge again and again from a different side:
Both strange, both familiar,
I pass through two countries:
my life, my dream.
Gardner, a retired high-school English teacher who describes herself as a “pyromaniac with language,” writes with clarity and heat, letting meaning spark between images. Her bridge becomes a threshold between past and present, self and other, certainty and possibility. It is at once intimate and universal.
Composer Tom Morgan, Ars Nova Singers’ Artistic Director, completes the chain. Known as a leading interpreter of new choral music and a champion of adventurous repertoire, Morgan has long been drawn to texts that explore identity, memory, and transformation. Gardner’s poem offers exactly that terrain: shifting vantage points, suspended spaces, and the fragile but necessary act of crossing.
In his musical response, the bridge becomes something we hear as well as see and imagine, a structure built in harmony, tension, breath, and resonance. The choir itself becomes the span between worlds.
And perhaps Gardner says it best:
A bridge is enough to lift our hearts.
Love is enough for both sides.
This is the promise at the center of Shared Visions: that art can carry us across distances – between people, between experiences, and between the lives we’ve lived and the ones we’re still imagining.