Forms is pleased to present The Reticent Volcano, an exhibition by Anne Carson. 

The reticent volcano keeps
His never slumbering plan—
Confided are his projects pink
To no precarious man.

If nature will not tell the tale
Jehovah told to her
Can human nature not survive
Without a listener?

Admonished by her buckled lips
Let every babbler be
The only secret people keep
Is Immortality. 

–Emily Dickinson, No. 1748

Forms is pleased to present The Reticent Volcano, an exhibition by Anne Carson. 

The philosopher Henri Bergson wrote of time in two respects: objective time (that of mathematical increments, calendars, work weeks, and wristwatches) and durational time, or “lived time,” that of the indivisible, multitudinous flow of our inner, subjective perception. In Bergson’s usage, lived time is an immeasurable, heterogenous outpouring of experiencing the world. A lava flow of intermingling layers of time.

In 2021, from her kitchen window in Iceland, Anne Carson watched the Eldvörp–Svartsengi volcano during a period of fissure eruptions after nearly 800 years of what volcanologists describe as an interval of repose. Translated from Icelandic as “fire cones–black meadow,” Svartsengi has continued to erupt since December 2023. A website monitoring volcanic activity indicates the current status: “restless.”

Carson’s drawings and paintings of Svartsengi, reproduced thirty-two times with a desktop inkjet printer, each small print with edges torn—“to avoid the brutality of scissors”—were repeatedly drawn upon, sewn into, and painted over during an indeterminate span of changing seasons and effusive erupting. “Beginning and ending with winter, I think,” Carson writes. 

Carson later assembled the thirty-two volcano works into the form of a scroll (When You’re Away Time Is Different), a longform intergenre photo-drawing, as if a sentence, of durational time into which Carson continues to work. The result is a repetition of difference that surfaces in mind Herakles’ words to Geryon in Carson’s Autobiography of Red: “Photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships.”

First presented in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, at the Skaftfell Art Center in 2023, When You’re Away Time Is Different is exhibited in its entirety, accompanied by thirteen volcanos selected by Carson in the summer of 2025. The Reticent Volcano is on view from October 30, 2025–January 18, 2026 on Saturdays from 12–5pm and by appointment.

Anne Carson (b. Toronto, Canada) is a poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.