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QUICK FLIP
ABOUT
freshwater | salt is a meditative exploration of water and its relation to Rosemary’s mental health recovery. Living with a lifelong mental illness like bipolar can at times feel incapacitating in a way difficult to tangibly describe, and can make it painfully difficult to understand identity as a unified whole. How do you show someone what depressive episodes spanning 10 years looks like, with full shapes? And then how do you convince people to care?
The collaborative images are illustrated by Madeline, Rosemary’s best friend and roommate. In each image both sides are needed to give context to the whole. Through many iterations of the drawings, Madeline grasped at the ineffable qualities and quantities of feeling that inhabit Rosemary’s world. But failing that, all she could do was explore perspective- get in close and back all the way up to try and see each wholeness of the thing.
Paired with the non-dual images moving the reader in and out of orbit with the world, Rosemary reveals parts of their ongoing journey of recovery with a gravitational push for more equity for marginalized mentally ill folks. Through this collaboration, the audience gets to experience a mentally ill poet’s reflection on their cyclic illness, supported by nothing less than someone close to them fully seeing all the fragments of their identities as whole, in full colour.
PRESS
like a slab of never-ending concrete // finding form for sickness in freshwater, by Kara Santon, ReIssue, 2023
ARTIST BIOS
Rosemary 昕禾 Hu is a poet and educator working on and benefitting from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Sciences from UBC, and currently works as a YWCA Program Facilitator supporting at-risk youth seeking employment into the bike industry. She is very proud to be part of the mentally ill community. Rosemary is in awe of how much care and intention Madeline put into the illustrations, and grateful for all their shared conversations about mental illness and wellbeing throughout this collaboration, and beyond. This is her first zine.
Madeline, along with her Housemate and first-time zine collaborator Rosemary, have a living room cramped with bikes. She studied Philosophy in school and having finished, found herself drawn to working with her hands, first in fixing up her old Nishiki bike and now as an apprentice Cabinetmaker. In her first attempt at illustration she discovered her fondness for simplicity and a deepened friendship through creative collaboration. She grew up in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil- Waututh peoples and finds peace and joy spending time in the city’s surrounding mountains.
