Eventually Everything Connects

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.