Jes Fernie:
Things left undone unsaid uncelebrated unplanned unfinished

Jes Fernie's publication is, in her own words, ‘a selection of mad, frayed, totally normal stories about undone, uncelebrated, abandoned things. They are spectacular, strange, problematic, hurtful, funny, ludicrous tales. They tell a bigger, messier story, rather than one that has been honed or finely crafted.’

Things left undone unsaid uncelebrated unplanned unfinished features Flemish-Irish artist Lily Van Oost, filmmaker Bob Quinn, the adventures of Americans Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra and James Turrell in Ireland, sculptor Eilis O'Connell and writer Maeve Brennan. In writing about how art gets made, what happens to it, and how world affairs, personal circumstances, and misfortune bump up against dreams and hard graft, Fernie notes that her encounters are not usually told in a world where success and bombast are prized. Rather, she recognises and even celebrates the vulnerability, the strangeness and the arbitrariness of artistic endeavour and much of life in general: ‘Perhaps there is a catharsis that comes with this, not solely based on a sense of jouissance experienced on discovering that other people’s achievements aren’t quite as dazzling as you had marked them out to be, but also just the relief – the pure, physical, glorious relief – that we no longer have to hold things together, to hone a narrative with no sharp edges.’