Painter, playwright, designer, performer & poet, Conrad underscores the esoteric wisdom that art – if it be art at all - is essentially sacred, religious and universal. Her poetry, like her paintings and clay sculptures, is at once highly emotional and deeply philosophical - a curious combination in an age where poetry has been transformed by academia and those who have been captured by it, into a precious intellectualism devoid of almost everything but irrelevance.
Conrad’s poetry is outlaw poetry. It eschews all rules, habits, and conventions. And for this, she has been roundly criticized. You can almost see the hairs rising on the necks of those irate academic poets who believe they are accomplishing something important by taking up arms against Conrad’s use of one-word lines and her lack of punctuation. As if these were issues that hadn’t already been put to rest years ago by the likes of e.e. cummings and others. Instead of “correct” formalisms, one finds in Conrad’s poetry nuances of an old tribal feeling. Something which cannot be taught in Creative Writing 101, or prodded from mediocre minds intent on furthering their poetic ambitions. Poet and Director of New Zealand’s Museum of Modern Art, Ian Wedde, has written:
"Conrad's art is never secular; it always conveys a deep tone of mystical or spiritual importance – (and) of the fundamental, factual, logical nature of such experience. Her art reaches back to a mediaeval, or Gothic, iconography…it returns the recent legacy of Modernist primitivism to a remote European history..(and) enters that visual language in a mediaeval drama in which no aspect of life, however domestic, was merely secular -- in which objects of domestic life were imbued with malevolent or benign powers, in which banal characters could be seen as satanic or saintly, in which sexual and religious forces ran back together toward some suppressed, pagan source."
Conrad’s power as a poet – as a “performance poet” - has as much to do with HOW she works as with what she expresses. “Groping in darkness,” she writes, “I erect MY BELOVED at the centre of my creative life. Around this sticky mandala, I spin… the heart screaming in its rickety cage... It’s the idea behind the idea behind the idea that I so winsomely suckle.”
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