The Poetics of the Body journeys into an imaginal space, pushing past the realm of experience, to create a container, densely layered with metaphors, flush with archetypes and symbols, for the imaginative act to establish a firm connection between visual experimentation and philosophical understanding. The resulting body of work, branched in three main streams of visual choices, remains rooted in the desire to draw out emotions although it might be unfashionable to think about emotion in art given the irony and sensationalism people have come to associate with the contemporary art scene.

The source material for Part One is mainly reappropriations of Xheka's own work allowing for the employment of past patterns and marks to represent the fact that one can, and must, break from old beliefs and outdated mindset in order to deconstruct systems of the past in an effort to build a better future seeeped in bright colors.

Part Two borrows lines from the work of some of Xheka's favorite contemporary writers, in particular Richard Sinken, May Swenson, Rita Dove, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hass, Nina MacLaughlin, Jericho Brown, Megha Rao, Gary Snyder, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Ocean Vuong in order to allow the artist to operate in her own space and time, expressing herself to herself alone lost in creating a poetical achieve by wrangling a pair of scissors as if she were an ancient warrior in search of a flow state.

Waiting for something interesting to emerge from the pre-cut jumble of figurative elements and biomorphic shapes, Part Three fuses various fragments (typically in the form of shallow relief construction), pasted and layered together to create shading and multilayered structure, wants the viewers to feel as if they are not in front of a collage but rather walking through a poem, peeping under the layers, squnting in an effort to read the half hidden words, impatiently separating the colors from the text, reassessing the words as truths. Each mark, crease, bruise, and indentation is meticuluously chosen to impose - has Didion has it, perfectly, in The White Album - "a narrative line upon disparate images" which have the viewers mirrored back to themselves poetically. Consequentially.

• Visual Influences

Barbara Kruger - Kruger’s work uses catchy phrases laid over images to challenge ideas of power, identity, and sexuality. "I work with pictures and words because because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."

Raquel Van Haver - "... a big part of the work is about technique. It’s about figuring out how to manipulate your materials in such a way that it can get really thick and layered and contain the colours...”

Amanda McCavour - McCavour makes large-scale embroided installations using her sewing machine and water soluble fabric.