home/love/sick
Anni Hagberg
1
May 2024
1
May
2024
This text is presented alongside the exhibition Rub You by HeeJoon Youn as part of the Seventh Gallery Emerging Writers’ Program 2024.
Lovesickness, and homesickness alike, are about desire.
About longing, but not really wanting.
Each indulging in greedy pools of melancholy,
they dwell in past possibilities.
The mind only pretends to want,
having already decided otherwise.
But the ache in the body is quite real.
Perhaps there is an empathy of body and place,
where normally empathy is of the heart and mind.
In the skins of the homesick and lovesick,
our bones throb with a thick bodily yearning.
A vicarious belonging to some person, time, or place,
the warm flesh and forms of yesterday.
Perhaps at the heart of such sickness
is the sadness that comes
with a visceral intensity reduced to an image
to a flatness that teases you
with the thought of a smell
and the memory of a touch.
This text is presented alongside the exhibition Rub You by HeeJoon Youn as part of the Seventh Gallery Emerging Writers’ Program 2024.
Lovesickness, and homesickness alike, are about desire.
About longing, but not really wanting.
Each indulging in greedy pools of melancholy,
they dwell in past possibilities.
The mind only pretends to want,
having already decided otherwise.
But the ache in the body is quite real.
Perhaps there is an empathy of body and place,
where normally empathy is of the heart and mind.
In the skins of the homesick and lovesick,
our bones throb with a thick bodily yearning.
A vicarious belonging to some person, time, or place,
the warm flesh and forms of yesterday.
Perhaps at the heart of such sickness
is the sadness that comes
with a visceral intensity reduced to an image
to a flatness that teases you
with the thought of a smell
and the memory of a touch.
Anni Hagberg
Anni Hagberg (b. 1995, Cairns) is a Finnish-Australian visual artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. Hagberg has a particular interest in investigating unpredictable process-driven material encounters through sculpture and installation. Primarily working with non-traditional materials within ceramic and craft processes, Hagberg has regularly exhibited her work since 2019.