Eventually Everything Connects

Sarah Firth

Eventually Everything Connects
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Allen & Unwin
Country
Australia
Published
3 October 2023
Pages
288
ISBN
9781761068416

Eventually Everything Connects

Sarah Firth

WTF is going on? How can I find joy in these precarious times? Is my smart phone hijacking me? Why am I so horny? What do I do with this grief? What's it like being the slug that lives in my bathroom sink?

Eventually Everything Connects is Sarah Firth's debut graphic novel, a collection of interconnected visual essays created over eight years. Sarah invites you into her wild mind as she explores ways to see with fresh eyes, to face the inevitability of change,and to find freedom in sensuality.

With raw honesty and vulnerability, Firth reminds us that the profane and the sacred, the tender and the cruel, the rigorous and the silly, all coexist in dynamic tension. This book is a delicious mix of daily life, science, philosophy and irreverent humour that is comforting, confronting and mind-expanding in equal measure.

Review

Sarah Firth is a Melbourne cartoonist, who (among her other arts practices) produces drawings-plus-words documentation of meetings and presentations, so that participants and attendees later have a record of what was discussed, and the ideas that arose live in that white-heat of cross-pollinating conversation. In this book, a collection of Firth’s autobiographical pictorial sequential essays (i.e. comics), she is ‘graphically recording’ herself and her cogitations about the state of the planet, the state of the neighbourhood, and the state of her own existence.

We perch on her shoulder as she probes and investigates the mysteries and quandaries which confront her, as she stumbles about in the often beautiful, occasionally distressing messiness of her life, which will remind you of your own. Heading down to the dog park. Olympic weight-lifting. The weirdness of sex. The interior vision of a coffee companion suddenly liquefying like a zombie in a horror movie. There is an alarming, charming intimacy here, a breathtaking can-do candour, a willingness by Firth to keep the camera rolling even when, in fact especially when, the matters under discussion become deeply personal.

The title is from a quote from the designer and architect Charles Eames. Between her words and pictures, Firth weaves a pulsing web of perceptions, inter-actions and quotations (Rebecca Solnit, Patrica Lockwood, John Berger and others), assembling more of a neural web than a spiderweb, from which arises a keen sense of the Sarah Firth way of seeing, feeling and thinking. She utilises the animist tendencies of comics to translate ideas into icons and to increase the ratio of signal to noise, even when she’s being critical of our tendency to over-interpret data for signal. Eventually everything does connect, though this book is less proof of that assertion and more the presentation of a mindset which believes it might be so.

This item is in-stock at 5 shops and will ship in 3-4 days

Our stock data is updated periodically, and availability may change throughout the day for in-demand items. Please call the relevant shop for the most current stock information. Prices are subject to change without notice.

Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to a wishlist.