EMERGENCE
- Jennifer Robson
- Apr 1
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 3
Support the Journey-The Story so Far
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
Emergence is an ongoing body of work, which tells the story of how the onset of chronic mental and physical illness, led to what is referred to as 'a dark night of the soul'. It is the story of a metaphorical death of the self, followed by a spiritual awakening to the power of the earth and the power within oneself, as part of nature. The works themselves are visceral graphite drawings that honour nature and explore the complex connection humans have with our natural environment in modern society. The drawings posit the bodily self becoming/emerging from nature and in turn, returning to the earth itself.
The sketches of the reclining body are based on the first image that came to me, for this body of work. It was inspired by the dark place I was in when I was at my sickest. It was a lonely isolated place, and I spent hours alone in pain, unable to do nothing much but watch TV and wait for the pain to end. As I started to get better with treatment, I saw myself still on the forest floor, not dead, but time had passed, as I was covered in mosses, mushrooms and lichens. I wanted to make work about that experience, to make it mean something. Subsequent works explore the struggle of emerging from devastation, the figure rising in renewal and acceptance. The image was a comfort, that even at my most stationary, I was still fertile, still worthy of my place in the family of things, as mushrooms and lichen erupted from my skin.
In the beginning Emergence was about rising from devastation, because I so wanted my life back. I drew Tree Woman (2022) as the first proper piece of art since becoming ill. And in a way she was what I was aiming for. As time has passed though, and the seasons have come and gone, I realise that everything is a perpetual cycle, that this is the process that drives life, flux. The woodland never completely dies, something is always emerging, something is always going dormant, decomposing and recomposing. There is an expected trajectory when we get ill, immediately people say 'Get well soon!' And when we are young yes, we do often get well soon. But chronic illness? Nope, still sick. And generally folk don't know how to deal with that. We have lost our connection to the earth, the earth and it's ways of dealing with difficult things, teach us how to endure. The earth knows how to hold endings, nature doesn't stop taking care of it felled trees. The seasons are not defined, they ebb into each other, wrestle, exist in parallels, they are not linear, that's a very limited way of looking at it. It gives you no where to go, you can't get well so you feel like you've somehow failed. And healing isn't linear either, my body can be healing, yet it will also still be sick, but it still has so much to offer. But why is it such a struggle for our systems, and in general people to hold space for chronic illness? This is a question for another day before I get deeply political and go off on one!
Emergence was also born from rage, rage at the systems, the lack of love and care, the rage of my limitations and dreams unfulfilled. I found myself in a disabled body, and I looked at all the things that contributed to the emotional pain of dealing with that new normal, the things that made it harder, all of which stem from the imbalance in a our extractive, capitalist, colonial, patriarchal, mysogynistic society, The drawings are a rebellion against all of that. It's a radical reclaiming of the self, in a body that is viscerally human in a world that refuses to see you. I draw the body (mine) in truth, naked as she is, in dormancy, decomposing and rejected despite being fertile and fruiting mushrooms. I draw the struggle to be seen in all of your authenticity, the freedom of being fully in your own nature, a rejected body growing, emerging, dancing, joyous and standing tall. I draw my body in pain, with it's scars and lived experience, asking the viewer to witness, witness the devastation, the pain, the joy, the beauty, the cycles of life, the truth of being human. The work is a righteous act of healing. It's about finding the beauty in the rejected, the covered up, the hidden truths of real embodied bodies. It's humanity rising. I draw what other refuse to see
I'm interested in bodies we rarely get to see, and the parts of humanness that is tidied away, denied, ignored. Humans have done the same to the planet we live on, we treat it just like we treat our bodies. The systems and ideas we live by have seperated humans from their own nature, from each other's humanity, from our place in the cycle of things, our own miracle of living breathing flesh, so it's no wonder we have done the same to our home, to earth.
I look around at the fallen trees, each one a fertile cornucopia of renewal. The forest knows how to take care of everything, renewing, renewing, it always seems find a way. Us? We bury our waste and hide it away. We need to face ourselves, and nature will help us, of course she will, but we need to open our eyes first.
Witness.
Comentarios