In a short essay titled Visual Poetry: Reading the Image, thalia writes that “The prime objective [of visual poetry] is to investigate the literary context, meaning, understanding, and our use of words. It forces the inattentive reader to pay attention to the word, as the word calls out to be seen anew. It calls for the reader’s participation, instead of passive appreciation.”¹

This is exactly what is emphasised in thalia’s work: her process involves concentrating deeply on contemporary language, and to bearing witness to the times. Attention is placed, too, on the reader-viewer who creatively interprets these elements, creating the work in turn. She asks the reader to stop, to pause, and to make meaning and interpretation for themselves.

After working as a stenographer for a number of years, thalia succumbed to a work-related repetitive strain injury caused by rapid movement – typing, that was little understood at the time. π.o in his excellent introduction to A Loose Thread describes thalia’s shorthand poetry as “an injured worker’s art”:

In a kind of self-imposed isolation, imposed by “pain” and cut off from the workforce, she in earnest began working on shorthand poetry, i.e. an injured worker’s art. Just like convents which were centres of embroidery, her kitchen table became her studio, along with the solitude of a world that does not recognise the art and poetry of intermedia woman’s practice.²

While the practice of visual poetry is on the margins, recent years have slowly seen more publications dedicated to feminist intermedia practice. As Kerchy & McAra write in a special issue dedicated to the subject: “Intermediality challenges and transforms our notion of art, our reception of experience and the role of the reader/spectator and leads back to the etymological root of textuality: ‘textere’, meaning ‘to weave’ and remind us how ‘the thread is a remarkably frequent symbol in contemporary feminist art’”.³ The weaving metaphor is explicit in the title A Loose Thread, a title which also comments on going against the current, and a cluster of poems in the collection respond to this theme (‘Woven Thread’, ‘The Weaver’, ‘Threads’). ‘Weaver’, composed of the notation for ‘spin’, ‘measure’ and ‘cut’ can be read to evoke the myth of the Three Fates and matrilinear histories, and visually forms an abstract face with an all-seeing eye. The material of cloth and embroidery is a part of thalia’s visual poetry practice and, significantly, thalia had six works of ink on cloth, ink on plasticised table cloth, and embroidery on cotton included in the visual poetry exhibition Words on Walls: A Survey of Contemporary Visual Poetry, curated by Barrett Reid, at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 1989. These inextricable links between text and textiles draw in the tactile dimension of poetry, and the emphasis in thalia’s work on embodiment and materiality, and on women’s labour and art.

The body has long been forgotten in literary analysis⁴, and thalia’s work returns us to the body, to the hand, to the eye. This language is made through the hand, through the movement of bone, blood and muscle, an exacting eye and the bodily memory of shorthand. Language holds memory, and the body too holds memory. thalia works with the system of shorthand so it will not be forgotten.

Working with the graphical space of an A4 page, thalia transforms what is usually temporary and rapid notes to be typed into a final document, into an enduring art practice. Despite the obsolescence of shorthand, thalia’s poetics has endured; she has been practicing her own invented style of visual poetics using this notational system for more than five decades. Reading thalia’s poems makes us see how writing is drawing and harks back from before the origins of the Roman alphabet, its evolution from symbols to pictograms and ideograms to the letter forms, and looks toward the future.

‘Enduring’ is a pertinent term to describe thalia’s shorthand poetics. I’d like to give a nod to aj carruthers who, in the online magazine Jacket2, in a series he composed on ‘The Lives of the Experimental Poets’, wrote about thalia: “It is hard to express precisely the enormity and gravity of this life’s work – or lifework – because so often experimental work is seen as incidental, one-off, a thing done alongside the more standard work, rather than sustained and lifelong or lived.” And continuing: “I can only think that, with a poet and visualist like thalia, one with a devotional sensibility of a kind comparable to artists like Hanne Darboven, Agnes Martin, or Channa Horwitz, hers is a poetry that persists in time, over time, ‘overPower’ (structures); and that because of its utter radicality, its staunchly proletarianist aims, it must last.”⁵

thalia lives surrounded by her work: paintings are arranged in clusters on the walls, the garden is full of glass bead graffiti, which catch the light, channelling and holding space, love and resistance through the domestic spaces of the house and garden. In this way too, her work evokes for me the concrete poets Ian Hamilton Finlay and his sculptural concrete poetry garden Little Sparta and Mary Ellen Solt who, well known for her ‘flowers in concrete’ poems, also made colourful protest poster poems, and poems using international systems of code, as shown in a recent 2024 publication of her work.⁶

In this talk, I’ve aimed to situate thalia and her work within both local and global contexts and show a wide array of her visual poems to a new audience. thalia invites us as readers to reconsider the word and pay attention, inspiring associative new meanings through translation and her own invented pictorial language. Working from the margins, through plurality, porosity and hybridity of form and material, thalia documents and responds to the world through her slow and enduring shorthand poetics, crossing boundaries between the arts, and pushing the limits of the literary.

A wide survey of thalia’s poems will be exhibited, alongside Sandy Caldow’s visual poetry, ceramics and sculptures, at Negative Press and Keeper Print Room, Brunswick, Melbourne/Naarm in February 2026.