Between Waste and Creativity by Elsa Richardson

When Lucy first told me the name of their new film on show at Kunstintiuut Melly as part of their exhibition ‘Ooze’ (9th June - 19th nov 2023), I assumed that it was a reference to Flush (1933), Virginia Woolf’s imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Usually dismissed as one of the great modernist’s lighter works, it is in truth a quite remarkable experiment in stream of consciousness that attempts to capture the multitudinous thoughts, feelings, and fleeting impressions that flash through the mind of a family dog. Lucy’s film is, however, not about the adventures of a floppy-eared canine and its poet mistress. The title, Flush 2023, alludes to the dispersal of colour and the mechanism by which waste is expelled from the home, and it’s subject is the freemartin cow. As the film begins, I feel a hot crackle of embarrassment at my error, a mishearing that speaks of an attachment to real dogs —the cantankerous terrier that snores at my feet— and their fictional counterparts, which can verge on the mawkish. Yet as the camera follows the cows through milking, rutting, insemination, as animal’s encounter technologies varied in sophistication from the metal gates that pen them to the delicate work of the laboratory, trailing fluids —shit, milk, blood, semen, piss— in their wake, my thoughts crept back to Woolf’s experiment in non-human memoir. As hard as I tried to shoo the dog out the door, Flush kept nosing his way back in.

Perhaps what links these two seemingly incommensurate texts —canine biography and artist moving image— is attention. By slow track of a reluctant lollop, close-up of an extravagantly lashed eye, a gentle lick of the nose, muscular form silhouetted as the last of the day’s light gathers itself in, we are drawn in again and again by the promise of intimacy with the film’s bovine subjects. Overlaying these images is a poem that pays a particular kind of attention, biographical, that is not usually bestowed upon non-human subjects. It begins, like Woolf’s Flush, with an origin story. Where the pedigree dog ‘claims descent’ from a family of the ‘greatest antiquity’, the freemartin was once devil ‘cast’, the animal’s name is broken down: farrow, ferry, free: freemartin. Questions of genealogy and inheritance serve to locate cows and dogs as historical subjects, as creatures with pasts that can be traced and in possession of biographies that might be worth writing. The scientific language of reproductive management is also, as film and text acknowledge, a profoundly impoverished mode of address that exposes the limits of cross-species knowability. Poetry, a form better attuned to the productive potentials of the abstruse, offers an alternative approach to writing of non-human lives that revels in the messiness of our cross-species entanglements. The poetic authoring of Flush 2023 allows us to glimpse the freemartin’s existence beyond biological determinants. This is made possible by what Lucy describes as poetry’s ‘viscosity’, forces of flow and resistance that —like the exchange of blood and hormones through shared placental connections— move meaning between categories and expose the contingency of concepts like fertility, productivity, sex, nature, and waste.

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