amelia wallin

'no rain, no rainbow' or difficult feelings in a rented body (after Olivia Liang and David Wojnarowicz)

CATALOGUE ESSAY FOR SARAH BRASIER’S ‘NO RAIN, NO RAINBOW’

Picture a jug, delightfully matt on the outside, smooth and glossy inside. A curved, exaggerated form. It comes in an array of colours. I like the dark green or maybe the brown. A handle that juts out, leaving a small O for the fingers to reach through. A lip through which to guide the liquid into other vessels. I do not need such an object, but I want it anyway.

Whenever my body feels restless, my mind turns to a little patch of land. I imagine the house I will build and the aforementioned jug sitting on the table and all the other covered objects that will fill the house. And then just as quickly I imagine the land parched, the gum trees igniting, the fires rolling towards the house, lapping at its edges, quickly consuming it. Then I imagine rising water levels, the fear of flood, the panic of gathering belongings, the scramble to find higher ground, the destruction of the house with all those covered objects. What’s the point, I ask myself, in buying the expensive jug, when the world is ending.

***

I am reminded of a painting by artist Sarah Brasier from 2021. As a painter Brasier regularly employs signs and symbols from the natural world, and imbues them with human meaning and pathos. In one such painting, a ladybird sits in a comfortable chair in a living room. The curtains behind her are engulfed in flames, yet she calmly continues reading Deepak Chopra’s handbook on happiness, ‘Power, Freedom, and Grace’.

What constitutes the pursuit of happiness under late capitalism and in the face of environmental catastrophe? How might one reconcile or reckon with a lack of agency against forces much greater than ourselves? Or, to put it another way, what can be done with these difficult feelings of apathy and hopelessness?

I find this line of questioning reflected in the work of Brasier. In her latest collection of paintings, ‘no rain, no rainbow’, Brasier depicts ten vignettes that feature anthropomorphic figures such as dancing birds, raving daisies, and sentimental clouds. A mother whale and her calf tenderly look into each other’s eyes, rainbows illuminate messages or warnings, two clouds comfort each other, a crowd of writhing flowers revel and a mischief of magpies perform karaoke. Together, the subjects of these paintings oscillate between feelings of desire and apathy, loneliness, and contentment.

In her book on loneliness in the city, writer Olivia Liang proposed that “amidst the glossiness of late capitalism we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.” The proposition that difficult feelings are a native texture of our lives weaves itself throughout Brasier’s work.

A flock of birds in a picturesque blue sky loosely form the words “fuck you”, a single flower kneels at a gravesite grasping a bouquet of cut flowers. Dozens of uniform flowers work from identical laptops, the memo “rent’s due” is materialised in a rainbow above their head. In addition to exploring the “difficult feelings” of loneliness and anxiety, several paintings in this series also evoke “minor negative emotions” such as feelings of boredom and apathy. In her book ‘Ugly Feelings’, philosopher Sianne Ngai argues that these are “non-cathartic states” in that, unlike anger or rage, they don’t lead to action. I am reminded of my own materialistic desires made redundant in the face of ecological emergency (I didn’t buy the expensive jug).

The critters in Brasier’s paintings are undeniably cute. For Ngai, “cute is in fact an aesthetic ‘of’ or ‘about’ minorness – or what is generally perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, trivial, and above all, unthreatening.” Brasier uses cute as an aesthetic category to examine our limited agency under capitalism. These cute critters are trapped in what we call “the daily grind”, imbued with the feelings of futility and apathy that come with human existence. By placing these feelings in the bodies of anthropomorphic critters, Brasier makes them digestible, unthreatening and above all relatable: minor feelings represented by a minor aesthetic category.

Yet at the same time, Brasier reminds us of the impermanence of life. Flowers wilt, the shift ends, the working week draws to a close, the birds scatter and the clouds move across the sky. If moments of peace and joy are fleeting, so too are the difficult feelings. This sentiment recalls the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, an idiom that evokes the impermanence of life.

For the creation of ‘no rain, no rainbow’ Brasier drew inspiration from ‘The spring of my life’, a collection of poetry by the Japanese working-class poet, Issa. Following the haiku tradition, Issa’s poetry springs from an attentive observation of everyday life. He is celebrated throughout Japan, and especially revered by children for his poems featuring small birds, bugs and flowers. The titles of several paintings in this series are borrowed from Issa’s haikus. In addition to the shared titles, Brasier’s paintings carry forth this same attention to the lived, the daily, the overlooked.

For Brasier, friendship is a creative motivator, she aims to build a supportive community of people in the art world. Her paintings embellish the details and feelings of a fully shaped life, with all the complexities of living under capitalism. She attends to the clouds and birds we witness with our face uplifted, the easily missed flowers at ankle height. At the heart of her work is the question of what does one do with the feelings that constitute a life? And what might we learn from an attentive study of our own minor feelings?