Jennifer Eadie
Image Credit: D Laslett and J Eadie, digital photograph # 1, 2023
Jennifer Eadie writes about Fran Callen in Neoterica 2024.
Do not give in - but give- over
Everything is happening at once:
her artwork contains everything.
when Fran was a child, her father told her how the history of the earth is held
in those fragments of rock
and here, on this kitchen table,
her history
is held in these drawings:
this then, is an archaeological dig.
As we speak, she
writes the name directly onto the surface of the artwork but
the letters are not static on this uneven
territory
made of hardened plastics and
gesso: they are dancing: the word is bleeding into a tea-cup imprint: on which sits a fallen plaster cast of a milk bottles: that is resting on a drawing her little one did when they were entangled in the garden years ago: which is caressed by the pigment: which is spilling onto broken eggshells:
You need to recognize that the entire work is a drawing – actually, I take it back – you need to understand that for Fran,
everything is drawing:
only then you are ready to begin picking up the fragments she has laid out in this work:
and only then do you realise there is no boundary: every part of her is in these lines.
To draw:
‘to create a mark on a surface’
[here, the surface is her heart]
and/or
‘pull or drag so as to make another / object / mark, follow behind’
[to follow another too far]
and/or
‘to draw another’ towards you
[to draw another to you: to be in love: to give your entire self]
To abrase:
‘to wear down or rub off: smooth off’
[we do this to each other]
to draw/
to abrase/
is to begin again: to build oneself again:
she is rebuilding a world
here:
the space in between:
in between motherhood and oneself and all that comes with the most intense love and the most intense loss: in this space she is creating something embodied and vulnerable:
and then offering it to us
as a gift [that is saying]:
do not give in- to the grief but give- over to it:
allow it to form lines so as to mark the surfaces of our bodies:
so that from either side of us:
strength emerges:
popping and fizzing
in those bursts of yellow and
spaces in-between the artifacts. plaster. plastic. packaging. pigments. graphite. gold leaf. glitter. odd socks. eggshells. moulds. stains and Pikachu.
Jennifer Eadie is a writer, artist, and academic living on Kaurna Country. Her practice is interdisciplinary and collaborative. She creates durational works that seek to reorientate collective relationship with place and the body. Within this context, her written work is intentionally fragmentary; bringing together poetry, found material, theory, and audio transcription. Current creative projects include Footprints w/ The Kaurna Womens Art Collective, UNRAVEL w/ Adrianne Semmens and The Limit of Structures w/ Dave Laslett. Jennifer is a researcher at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame. Recent writing can be found in Sydney Review of Books, TEXT Journal and CORDITE Poetry. She is co-editor on the forthcoming book Critical Zones: Environmental Humanities in South Asia (Routledge) and upcoming collaborative works will be shared in Unlikely Journal, Nexus Arts, and Tarnanthi.