Connecting Threads
Golden moles, Portuguese millipedes, and a Forthcoming Fair
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Because of our inertia
2025
Inkjet print on Canson Arches 88 310gsm
19 x 28 cm
Printed by Arten
Edition of 29, with 10 artists’ proofs
Created especially for Burning Inside: A print exchange folio and exhibition project
Tell The Trees (Listen to the Trees)
Bower Ashton Library, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK
Thursday 3rd April – Wednesday 30th July, 2025
Mind they don’t tangle! Mind they don’t snag! Loose threads aplenty! In the lead up to our stall at the eleventh NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair, we have been cutting, stitching, scoring, folding, signing, trimming, to trim again, and stacking our new artists’ book, Restoring corridors, taken up again, in readiness for you to unzip. We have been cautiously working in the wings of our paper theatre, How will they know there’s no-one left, and listing everything on our site, mindful, hopeful, that nothing from one pile has joined the cast of another. And folding our new zine, (Imagined) field notes, which sprung from this year’s World Book Night (WBN), and is currently on display at the Bower Ashton Library until Wednesday 30th of July, in a forest of submitted trees from near every pocket of the world.
From Tell the trees as a WBN prompt to Burning Inside, of further new work, you’ll find our print, Because of our inertia, created especially for Rona Green and Thomas A Middlemost’s print exchange and forthcoming exhibition in November of this year. Printed at Arten (rewind: March), we currently have several artists’ proofs available for presale through our online store. We are also offering the option of a Store Pickup for this and any of our artists’ books and zines from our stall in the Great Hall.
And all the while, the trip of entomologists continue to ‘floof’ and flourish at terrific pace, freely sampling a wide variety of browse. Interwoven between the splicing of prints, Harriet, Helena, and Ed (pictured below being weighed) prove it won’t be long until they graduate to the outdoor enclosure in the back garden, and we set up our stall beneath the Leonard French.
Because of our inertia
From Katherine Rundell’s book, The Golden Mole and Other Vanishing Treasure, foregrounding the magnificence around us which we risk losing before we’ve even began to understand, told through 22 species either endangered or containing a subspecies that is endangered, sprang our response to this year’s print exchange theme: Burning Inside. “So much can still be saved. It is the greatest task, now, of everyone alive: to keep it from the flames”[i]. As artists and wildlife carers, most of the magnificence around us which we encounter needs attention and care, and these actions are what fuels us.
We have learnt, and are learning, everything from the animals in our care, and in doing so, it has reawakened a way of seeing. Because ‘nature’ is not ‘out there’, but everywhere, everything, interconnected. Just as our care work and artwork is becoming indivisible, it is one. Multifaceted and glorious.
In the company of a glass negative echidna[ii], a Little lorikeet, and a Varied lorikeet[iii] with a bright red cap, we step up, to ensure the world remains “a body of unimaginable splendour [turning] on its axis, calling us to its aid”[iv].
[i] Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole and Other Vanishing Treasure, London: Faber & Faber, 2023, p. 180.
[ii] From Walkabout magazine: original photographs and associated records, 1934–1974, Box 10, in the collection of State Library New South Wales.
[iii] A Little lorikeet and a Varied lorikeet as drawn by Silvestor Diggles, from the third volume of Ornithology of Australia, commences with Cacatua and ends with Strepsilas, ca. 1863–1875.
[iv] Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole, p. 186.
Whether in the land of the Leadbeater’s possum, where we threaded through the forest, gathering ideas, spotting fungi, and unintentionally collecting leeches on our socks or at the Friends of Hillcroft Park City Nature Challenge, where Bronze Wing Street meets Cuckoo, recording our observations — Portuguese millipedes, Tribe Archimantini, and Onion Earthballs! — to iNaturalist, the strands we follow now are sure to wind up in something new to spark. Standing small and awed beneath the Elephant tree (a Mountain ash, 12.9 metres around the trunk, at the time the nearby sign was erected, on the Cumberland Walk) is a good place to be.
Whilst we might not have been able to determine a bright red Whirligig mite from a Clover mite, we could easily locate and identify Lucy Guerin Inc’s One Single Action: In an Ocean of Everything in the latest print edition of Fjord Review. (So happy to be a part of this print edition!)
Image credit: The two of us, lost in the meditation of recording flora and fauna and funga, at the Friends of Hillcroft Park City Nature challenge, photographed by Oleksandr Pogorilyi.
(Though bent with different purpose, this photo in particular, also by Olek, momentarily reminded me of Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) and the essence of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000). Thank-you for inviting us, @kyokoimazu, and for organising such a lovely and important wander amongst the Nodding Saltbush and Prickly Moses.)
