Posted March 31, 2026
One of the joys of Shared Visions: RubyFire is watching how a single image travels—changing shape, meaning, and emotional temperature as it moves from artist to poet to composer. In this third Chain of Inspiration, visual artist Jan R. Carson’s Alteration 3 becomes the starting point for a deeply reflective journey through language and sound.
Carson’s work invites contemplation before interpretation. Alteration 3 feels both deliberate and unsettled; it is an image shaped by intervention, transformation, and the trace of human presence. It suggests that something has been changed, but not erased. That tension between what is visible and what is implied becomes the emotional ground from which the next link in the chain emerges.
Responding to the artwork, poet Moudi Sbeity wrote The Poet Wonders, a text that lives in the space between observation and inquiry. Rather than explaining the image, the poem listens to it. It asks what it means to witness change and what it means to participate in it. The voice is searching, attentive, and open-ended, inviting us to linger in uncertainty rather than resolve it. The poem doesn’t close a door; it opens one.
Composer Paul Fowler takes Sbeity’s text and transforms it once again, this time into sound. His setting amplifies the poem’s sense of curiosity and interior motion, allowing the choir to inhabit the questions at its heart rather than simply narrate them. The result is music that feels exploratory and alive, unfolding in real time as the singers give voice to wonder itself.
And then we come to the final step in the Chain of Inspiration: you.
When the choir sings Paul Fowler’s setting of The Poet Wonders alongside projections of Jan R. Carson’s Alteration 3, the circle is completed—not by explanation, but by attention. Your listening becomes part of the artwork’s transformation.