I owe my beating heart a debt for its endurance, its persistence, its
profound knowledge that is beyond any capacity to know its amplitude for taking these detonations and insisting on living, on
beating … beating, jumping to the roof of the ribs.
Dionne Brand
1926 – 2020
Known beginning — known ending. The distance between her birth and death is made measurable by a dash. Such is the neighbourly grace of the two. The beginning of a life on one end and death on the other. The dash is employed as an arrow, its pointed head which signifies linear direction is omitted (although implied). What a flawed way to measure a life.
1926 … 2020
Perhaps an ellipsis ought to replace the dash, with the spaces between each of the three dots a reminder of the many moments when one's physical existence nearly met its corporeal end but didn’t.
Fran Herndon lived in spite of and through many such (near) endings, like: growing up on a farm in the South of the United States of America just after the turn of the 20th century. Living through and escaping McCarthyism. Living as a woman with Indigenous ancestry1 in a country whose founding ruptured her relationship to land. I could continue in this vein to no speculative end, but perhaps I should start by stating that Fran Herndon lived.
Despite attempts to place her within the known and recognisable canon of linear art categorisation, the available texts and interviews unfortunately end up writing of her as parenthetical to the more recognisable names. The texts are warranted in their placing of her in community and chosen family and I am not proposing some essentialist reading of her work that denies her relationality. However, I abandon the ritualised ways in which she has been written about.
A letter sits next to another, and another, and another, and another to form a word and that word sits next to another, and another, and another, and another to form a sentence.
When choosing a word to express a thought or anything that belongs to the realm of the intangible; an endeavour that walks alongside the former is that of also not choosing to use a word that can communicate a similar sentiment as the chosen word. In this sense, the medium of collage is in concert with some of the workings of language. For in collage one chooses a specific aspect of a photograph, from the frame in which it is homogeneous to form a new image.
This approach that language and collage share in the context of Herndon’s practice can be attributed to her having lived in the company of writers and poets.
In her collage Untitled (Draft collage) (1964), a figure prostrates himself on the foreground to the lower right of the composition. It is as though he is moving towards the us that is witness to his retreat. Above him and to the top of the composition, a miniaturized line of soldiers stand in army salute, possibly waiting for instruction from an unidentifiable authority figure. They are in full uniform, theirs is the mechanical stance of those whose allegiance is with the state. In this stance, they are not merely citizens, they are the arm of the state; either conscripted or volunteered but arms of the state nonetheless.
The figure in the foreground looks as though he is shielding himself from the descent of aerial attack, or the semblance of torrential rain as gestured by the painterly marks that obscure the central image. At the bottom of the central image are the boots of soldiers, neatly packed in rows, waiting to be worn or emptied of the human bodies that they index. When read in relation to the line of soldiers at the top, the boots offer another reading of the figure in the foreground as being the sole survivor of this sepia coloured assemblage. All the fear and dread that has taken root in him is made legible by the lines on his forehead. Herndon’s application of paint on the photograph(s) disturbs the assumption of photography as reportage, one whose coercive strength lies in delivering objective images. The indecipherable parts of Untitled (Draft collage) invite longer looking by denying the viewer its entire contents, and thus succeeds in subverting the medium of photography.
The longer I look at the central image ‘hidden’ behind the rain-like striations, my brain conjures up associative images in a similar way to how when I look at a sky full of clouds for a prolonged period. I can find a face, a tree or rabbit among the cloudy mass that covers the blue of the firmament. Pareidolia, from the German Pareidolie, whose elemental words are Greek in origin: para- which means beyond, alongside; irregular, abnormal and eidolon which means appearance, reflection in water or a mirror. An invitation to look beyond the surface of a given or withheld image. Although the associative images conjured up in my brain in Untitled (Draft Collage) are more unnerving than those I find in the abstracted mass in the sky. The most ‘identifiable’ is that of a mushroom cloud to the left, the profile of a face to the right and trefoil symbols that represent radiation to the right.2
Herndon attends to the photographic by eschewing the essential by muddying it with paint and the inconsistent application of the washes which came to typify some of the collages that she made during the 1960s, like Hell No Don’t Go (1964) and Catch Me If You Can (1962).
The 1960s (like any period) were marked by war (“like any period” these words fill me with a peculiar dread, not least of all because of their inaccuracy but quite the opposite, because of the normalcy with which we are made to bear witness to how the regime of violence repeatedly reinscribes itself onto us – the living), namely: The Algerian War, The Angolan War of Independence, The Laotian Civil War and The Vietnam War3. The latter being the one that the United States of America’s involvement was most documented; dubbed “The First Television War” and thus to which Untitled (Draft collage) can be read in relation.
Martha Rosler’s series of collages from 1967 to 1972 entitled House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home also attended to the involvement of America in Vietnam. Rosler administered a surgical precision in the composition of each of the works in the series to create collages uncanny in their fragmented disharmony. Beauty Rest (from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c.1967-72) depicts a single point perspective of three figures, which represent the White American nuclear family, of Mother, Father and child. They share a bed, oblivious to the grey ruin that envelopes them.
I am drawn to the absence of crisp, inconsistent edges in Fran’s collages. The rough edges, the use of loose paint and drawn marks speak of the immediacy with which these works were made, and the many socio- and geopolitical happenings which informed their making. Despite Rosler’s best attempts to employ collage as a critique of the neo-colonial empire, there is a blindspot that she shares with many others who critique from within empire’s regime; which is that in an attempt to do so, they end up reinscribing the same mechanism or merely renovate them. Rosler’s collages inadvertently reinscribe beauty according to the gospel of empire; and according to the gospel of empire that which is beautiful is the violence. Dionne Brand in Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, writes:
I propose that the colonial event is the aesthetic—that its pleasures, tastes, manners, consist of this juxtaposition. What is pleasing, what is beautiful is the violence.
I am reminded of South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, recounting the experience of working in the darkroom. Looking at photographs from the Silverton siege which happened in Pretoria in 1980, and the discomfort that writhed inside him at the sight of documentation of the event. While looking at the photographs, a colleague remarked that one of the ghoulish photographs was beautiful and when asked how he could say that, his response was “don’t you know that Black skin and blood make beautiful contrast.”
Thus, Rosler’s collages (without completely discounting them) rehash the naturalised gaze of (white) spectatorship.4 Each of the constituent photographs which make up her collages are stark and utterly clear, without shadow. This clarity is foundational to the medium and continues to be demanded from the ‘other.’ Fran’s collages exhibit no such fidelity to clarity; hers are sutured, with the spine of the stitching exposed, unbeautiful and skeptical of the rapidity at which these images arrived in America; asking instead, how much legibility is necessary for those at the centre of empire to think of themselves in relation to ‘the other’ beyond nation states.
The democracy of Neo-colonial empires relies and always has on the subjugation of the ‘other’. The ‘other’ who is displaced, and unacknowledged at home. Fran lived as the designated ‘other’ in the United States of America. By just living her life, she exposed the fiction and romance of American freedom and democracy.
I find myself drawn to her collages over her paintings. Although, when poring over her paintings of gardens, I am overcome with the sense that their strength lies not in them as aesthetic objects but rather in the spirit that undergirds them. A spirit of refusals. A spirit that exists outside the knowable rubric of refusals. In them, there are no countenances whose mouths have been pried open by pain or protest like those found in Hell No Don’t Go (1964), Death of Kid Paret (1963) or Hell Bent (Next Time) (1962). Instead, the faces of the figures in some of her garden paintings are faded, blank or looking away. The faded faces could be attributed to an insecurity that Fran had about including figures in her paintings as she once remarked that: “I was never very good at figures in a landscape. As a matter of fact I’m not good at figures at all, and they probably shouldn’t be in my work much, and they don’t appear very often.” Another reading could be that this was subtle foreshadowing – lodged deep within her, of the dementia that she would come to live with in her older years. A practice of mourning memory, unknowingly preparing for a loss that is yet to come. Her garden paintings are an intimate refusal. A refusal against the assault on her personhood by the state; an affirmation of her own humanity; despite the category of the human being exclusionary.
Although she also made her paintings in the 1960s, there’s a temptation to read them as antithetical to her collages, whose use of material is explicitly political. These paintings are not a nostalgic representation of the desire to return to some aggrandised beginning such as Edenic conceptions of the prelapsarian garden; or the romance invoked by words like ‘nature’ in the wake and ruin of the industrial revolution, which fueled Romanticism, a movement that sought eponymous relations with the land. Often in the ‘dark’ and ‘distant elsewhere.’ Often under the guise of imperialism. Fran’s gardens are her attempt to wrest herself from the sadness that had affixed itself to her since the early loss of her sister to polio, an upbringing marked by labour on a farm, caring for her two sons. They are a momentary reprieve, afforded to her by those to whom she was in relation: Robin, Jim, Jim’s mother and the babysitter, so that she could consider other forms of worlding even as hers was furnished by loss, displacement and bearing witness to the loss of worlds peopled by fellow inhabitants of the planet due to war.
As I write this, there is a 20 minute walk (as estimated by Google maps) between the desk at which I am writing and Horticus Botanicus Amsterdam. The quintessential botanical garden, first established in 1638.5 It was initially named Horticus Medicus and served as a repository of medicinal herbs as this was the manner in which ailments were treated.
I have to admit to being beguiled by the vast array of plant species in the collection on my first and only visit to the botanical garden, to the point that I almost forgot that the garden is a site of pillage and alienation. That its beauty is not metonymic but entangled with violence committed by the Dutch East India Company. And even though the ideological superstructure that occasioned its making has been modestly renovated, it still functions according to the same laws that informed its making. Earth ‘elsewhere’ had been emptied. Earth from Dutch colonies had been emptied and various plants conscripted to serve the demands of the Dutch empire. Thus my encounter with a drooping Encephalartos altensteinii (Eastern Cape giant cycad) in the middle of Amsterdam is not an innocent one. Held up by two black metal structures inside the Palm House, in a different setting, these poles would lend themselves to the reading of a lover exclaiming “I won’t let you fall, I will hold you up” at the sight of their beloved faltering. However in the palm house of the botanical garden, they read as the structures that support the collapse of imperialism. They read as the hubris of an empire that refuses the tree its collapse and instead enforces an imperial order even as the cycad protests.
I return again to the idea that the “colonial event is the aesthetic,” a beauty sustained by the pithy texts that accompany each of the botanical extracts. Framing pillage as a purely genteel act, rescuing the plants from a worse fate than the one that would have befallen them where they were once rooted. The Wollemi Pine, a coniferous tree once thought to be extinct, stands surrounded by oxidised metal bars. Its status as ‘critically endangered’ is said to warrant this imprisonment. The sight of the Wollemi’s caged status never left me, the enclosed tree is faint in my mind but the cage is vivid and haunting. Relations are thwarted between me and the tree, between tree and its neighbours, the solitary Wollemi grows in a carceral exile.
“The Horticus Botanicus Amsterdam received a license in 2006 to sell Wollemia offspring – the original is kept inside a protective cage. The proceeds of the saplings go to nature protection in Australia.”
“I have this memory of my mother and flowers ... She didn’t have a great garden, but there was all around me somehow this heat and color and insects, and I was picking the flowers and smelling them.”
Her mother’s garden was the spirit of gardens, even as Fran acknowledged its lack. Relations between her and land were made possible again. Her mother’s garden invoked what Sylvia Wynter called replantation.
In Fran’s gardens, the plants are the shape of plants. Abstracted. Free of the taxonomical categorisation foundational to imperial botany, where each plant is surveilled and extracted. Although not entirely free of the propertied relations of painting as a commodifiable medium – these relations were nevertheless suspended when it was her in a garden with her canvas, paint and paintbrushes. Fran employed abstraction to eschew capture and as someone to whom the luxury to pursue art without restrictions was not afforded, as someone who had to fight for it, this was a feat born out of the necessity to tend to the self.
[1] Herndon's friend and poet Elizabeth Robison writes: “Sometimes she [Fran Herndon] would talk about what it was to be from the Indigenous population in rural North Carolina, but her talk became halting. When I asked her what her tribe was, she just said ‘Indian,’ though later she said maybe Lumbee, and later still she spoke about the mixed-race nature of Indigenous people in her region, most certainly coming together with Black people who had escaped enslavement. Even among other Indigenous schoolmates, she met with denigrating comments because her skin was darker than theirs.”
I am drawn to the ways in which Fran Herndon troubles the ease of the uses of managerial categories of race and ethnicity.
[2] The latter being an interpretation offered by Leto Ybarra and Bea Ortega Botas in their essay for this folio, "The Art of Fran Herndon: Cavities, Circles, and an Outward Radiation."
[3] As noted by Caren Kaplan, the North Vietnamese refer to the war as "the American War."
[4] As I was writing, I wanted to trouble assumed singularity, through Rosler, to show that ‘House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c.1967-72)’ is not the only way a critique of war within the same medium can be exercised and that their status as canonical works shouldn't stop us from treating them as suspect. For me, Fran Herndon's collages are a reminder to always question approaches that universalise (even if they make no such claim).
[5] The Garden was moved to its current location in 1682.
[6] Even as this history is catastrophic and its damage ongoing, time is malleable and plastic... Saidiya Hartman, introduction to Dionne Brand (2025), Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Brand, Dionne. 2022. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. London: Penguin Random House UK.
Brand, Dionne. 2024. Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Mofokeng, Santu. 1996. “Santu Mofokeng.” Bergen Kunsthall.
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