“We don’t know what we’re making until we make it. When I shared my poem with Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau, two brilliant artists I was over the moon to collaborate with, the page dissolved and burst open all at once.”
Jennifer Still
Jennifer Still composes poems with physicality. She is the author of several handmade chapbooks and three poetry books, Comma (Book*hug), Girlwood (Brick Books) and Saltations (Thistledown). legs is a limited-edition chapbook with Baseline Press (2022) and winner of the 2021 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. In 2020 she collaborated with Christine Fellows on I Write with Fossils, a video-poem exploration, and the live-action sewing video Close Call with Chantel Mierau. legs: a collaborative exhibition, made its Canadian premiere in fall 2023 at Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg.
“How does the surface shape engage with the material world? How do some surfaces come to be considered permanent while others permeable? How does the idea of a surface translate to the digital realm? How did the surface become understood as a metaphor for a (lack of) profundity of knowledge? How is the surface implicated in the status of the image itself, as a support or as a medium?”
In “Three Chores,” Mierau turns the prolific messes of the human body into “fanciful concentrations.” These are not the usual taking-out-the-garbage messes but, rather, the accumulations of the dreaming eye and the overactive follicle—organic messes that gather and persist despite us.