CLARE HARNER
POETESS
Her poem Immortality has stayed with me for years, shaping my understanding of what endures beyond time so deeply that I set it for lyric soprano and orchestra in The Song Cycle of Love and Death, allowing her words to breathe again through music.
In Seven Sisters, her portrait is both a tribute and a conversation—an acknowledgment of how Clare's quiet strength continues to move, challenge, and accompany my own work.
A
new constellation is discovered of immortal artistic voices.Seven Sisters stands in quiet dialogue with his earlier work The Nine, turning its focus toward women whose lives and work shaped the course of artistic thought and practice. These figures are not assembled as symbols or categories, but approached as presences—distinct voices whose influence continues to resonate across time, discipline, and sensibility.
Clare Harner, the first of the Seven Sisters, is honored here for her canonical poem Immortality, a work of uncommon clarity and composure. Her writing confronts mortality without sentiment or consolation, offering instead a lucid and enduring vision of continuation beyond form.
The portrait extends this idea through restraint and subtraction. The Artist’s subtle use of negative space—where dress and sky become indistinguishable—allows absence to function as meaning, echoing Harner’s conviction that what endures is not the visible body, but the essence it releases.
Together, text and image form a meditation on legacy as transmission rather than monument. Seven Sisters proposes influence not as inheritance fixed in history, but as a living continuum—quiet, persistent, and endlessly unfolding.
Marianne Solène Kraus
Colmar
