CEDAR FALLS - The show is displayed just to the left as you walk into the Hearst Center for the Arts.

It's a small space, noticeable not for its grandeur, but because it is so dimly lit in contrast to sunlight pouring through the doors of the front entrance. Entering the U-shaped cove, however, the intensity of the work presented there is immediately evident.

This is the collaborative exhibition between poet Jonathan Stull and sculptor Roger Bartlett. An array of poems printed on heavy stock hang above elegantly carved wooden Japanese-style prayer sticks. The poems and carvings collaboratively constitute the "tac-eye" stick, a term Bartlett coined to imply both the tactile, touch-friendly surfaces of the sticks and the visual, sculptural carvings.

Both poems and sticks have visual elements. Stull's poems, like the sticks, are short in width, but extend 18 inches in length. Similarly, as the poems are imbued with a host of symbols and images, including bears, ghosts and various forms of plant and spirit-life, the sticks depict hints of human faces, fish, flowers, heart shapes and berries.

The sticks are stained to varying degrees of darkness with a vinegar-based patina. The designs, said Bartlett, occurred to him while carving.

"Having seen some images of traditional Japanese sticks, I just felt like carving. I thought it was enjoyable to touch and sight, and I just kept going - from one end to the other," the artist explained.

Stull composed his poems in a complementary fashion. Usually he composes poetry through a process of writing and revision, but writing tac-eye poems was different. "It's an intuitive thing. What I've done in this collection of poems is something very different from what I've done in the past. These poems are all first draft. There's no revision," Stull said.

That doesn't mean the writing was hastily done. Stull spent weeks at a time with one of the sticks in order to get a sense of it, before composing. "I'd live with them, have them around. I didn't quite dream about them … but you do let your subconscious go about things."

Bartlett said that although "you might say that Stull's poems were improvised, those improvisations are coming from a lifetime of writing."

The balance of craft and improvisation was key to the exhibition's success. "To have had someone spend time with something I have made is truly the most wonderful part of this experience," Bartlett said.

Stull's sentiments mirror Bartlett's. "I have found that this gave me a liberty to be allowed to free my mind via these sticks and allow my mind to be a creative entity of its own. I like the spiritual experience of freeing my mind and allowing this to all happen."

Stull's poems, as is his artist's statement opening the piece, are loosely concerned with the genesis story, as well as other creation myths. The poems are organized in a sequence so that certain motifs from the first poem reverberate and reemerge in the final poem, emulating the way each stick symmetrically ends with a fixed line.

"We live our lives in time. There's a beginning and an end, just like the sticks have. Then there's the journey of the life and the experience that brings, the patterns and the things that are noticed, the connections that you make between things as you pass through," Bartlett said.

Stull said that "form is important, particularly with these sticks, because there is a form to them - a length and a width. There's a certain structure. If you see the show you'll notice that there is a relationship between the poems and sticks."