I often push toward fragment / image / hybridity to make visible the gaps in between. Much of my work emerges from deep silences in my family for which there is no model for clarity.

Jenne Hsien Patrick is a writer and artist based in Seattle, WA. She writes poetry, comics, and hybrid text/image works often incorporating textiles and papercutting. Jenne is a Hugo House Fellow, a Tin House Workshop alum, and their work has appeared in publications such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, wildness/Platypus Press, and Honey Literary, among others.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:

PAINT BY NUMBER 1 (OUTSIDE SONGSHAN AIRPORT, 1969)

1. Top of the head, eye, neck, heart, gut, solar plexus, base of the spine.

2. The moment of departure. Before she crosses the gate: the threshold, the ocean. A one second pause.

3. The Emperor forbade the Daughter to cross the sea. She only wanted to know what was on the other side. She was presumed dead, and transformed into Jīng Wèi, the bird that

spends the rest of its life filling the sea, rock by rock, branch by branch, so no other child will meet the Daughter’s fate.

4. Did you fly through a typhoon? Did you make it through the storm?

5. What she left behind: grief. A hole. When her father died, she was birthed a temporary freedom.

6. In her hands: a parting gift. A pair of calligraphy scrolls, a painted poem from a friend of her father.

7. I never learned the word for grief in Mandarin. Maybe my mother hoped that I would have no use for it. Selected entries for the English word grief that I found in a Mandarin Chinese dictionary: 吃亏 (not quite right, means a more bittered loss), 忧伤 (almost, maybe heartbroken.) or 杜鹃啼血 (“literally, the cuckoo, after its tears are exhausted, continues by weeping blood (idiom) / fig. extreme grief”)

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:

IS THIS YOUR MOTHER? [excerpt]

Artist Reflection

Sometimes words are enough, breathing and living whole on the page. Yet, sometimes it feels as though there is a missing piece that I need to explore beyond the text to make sense of what I am trying to reach. To see if it can come closer to a truth I can recognize. An experiment in touch. 

I often push toward fragment/image/hybridity to make visible the gaps in between. Much of my work emerges from deep silences in my family for which there is no model for clarity. As I am not able to read or write Chinese characters but am fluent in speaking and understanding Mandarin (my first/heritage language), some pieces expressed only in the written word can be to my body a thin translation. I feel like I am trying to reach towards what I know bodily with all the languages I have: visual, aural, and written.

This isn’t to say that the text is lesser or separate from the images. I try to push the text, image, and sound to their full capacity as vessels for the piece. It is their interrelationships, the space in between and the moments where they touch and meet, which animates the whole.

Working with family photos is one approach in relationship building. The elements of a photo can be broken down into a constellation of meanings, beyond the story that’s often told. Making space for the unsaid and unknown both in the image or the time in between its shutter release and my looking in the present. Distilling the text into the spatial juxtapositions of frames by drawing, to inhabit the intentional and unintentional gaps in my grandmother’s memory. To examine these gaps between me and the past, using pencil upon slippery vellum to make imperfect and malleable images much as memory is itself. I am scratching towards an embodied truth, or as close as I can get.