Eurhi Jones Response to Ally Messer and Erin Mallea
Eurhi Jones response to
Erin Mallea & Ally Messer
At Grizzly Grizzly
March 2026.
I felt deeply and immediately connected to both Erin and Ally’s thinking and making.
Being a visual artist, taking on the writing challenge to respond to this show felt like a tough puzzle, but it has been unexpectedly fun, an opportunity to explore words with more pleasure than my usual writing for presentations, grants or social media posts.
Words like glean and gleam, dross and nurdle, root and shist started rolling around in my head, a reminder of a much younger version of myself writing poetry just for myself, for the sheer delight in juicy word pairings.
A few days ago, I attended a watershed art conference in during which artist Timothy White Eagle told us that deeper listening is a way out of the colonial mind-set and into better relation with the more-than-human world.
Slow down, sit with the river and listen.
I feel that energy in both Erin and Ally’s work.
Here is my offering after listening to them.
ERIN MALLEA
Nurdle
A smooth white nodule, neither shell nor bone nor wood,
but nurdle,
was coughed up from the eddying H20 flow,
by the river who murmured,
“take it back” to a human, who
listened
and placed that fossil fuel jewel in her jacket pocket, to later link
with purposeless pennies, plastic pearls, and ivory of polished styrofoam.
All knit together in a knock-off Web of Indra.
A kalidescope of reflections,
tied to infinite consuming.
Slag
Mudlarking, foraging, gleaning,
crumbs of dross, industrial forensics
of salvaged slaggy bits.
Aluminum and bronze,
rescued from riverbed and foundry floor,
tenderly polished to a Tiffany gleam.
Junk shop chains intricately link forgotten floor sweepings,
cast-off fishing gear,
and insects of ill-repute, preserved in a sweet and deadly amber of sugar for time immemorial.
Or just until they melt.
Lanternfly
Smash, crush, whack, flatten,
do it for the greater good.
Or
gaze,
amazed, at the lanternfly miracle,
opening the filagree wingtips of their pantyhose-hued fans,
to reveal coal-spotted, lipstick-red lower lingerie,
stunning as a framed cloud forest butterfly,
straight-pin stabbed through a thorax
on the Harvard museum wall.
How to define these invading hordes,
carried by ships from foreign shores,
sucking the life of American grapevines
with mouthparts seeking and suckling the right heavenly sap,
in the wrong landscape?
Who are the
citizens
invaders,
colonizers,
the naturalized
the natives?
Who belongs?
Who decides?
ALLY MESSER
Stump
A night mouse pattering across eleventh street floorboards,
suddenly transports-
to the mossy understory of its ancestral land,
and gazes up, surprised,
at dancing green caterpillar shadows,
and paper peels of overbark,
carefully cut, telling a story of sycamore kisses,
near misses.
Below velvet paws and whiskers, miles of mycelial flow run below joists,
That underground river, unspoken song of electricity, sugars and soil.
Listen for it.
The stump tells of fungal weaving,
of patching together the shattered soil,
of life from decay,
and an owlet of hope waiting to be found
within these city walls.
Sheep
Ovine follicles spin endless wooly spiderwebs
Which she cuts and twists, swirls and teases
into fat vegetal roots,
so her puppet arms can tell a story
Of sprouting and budding,
spinning wires of flowers into life.
Spiral
On a random, rainy chill city Friday,
encountering the spiral.
captivated by the curve
reminded of river rocks.
Reaching down.
Pocketing the gift, the lump, the stone.
Moving on into the night.
A blue June day, walking a twisting path of root and shist,
along the creek valley,
by the fern-ringed waterfall
wearing the green jacket,
fingers find the smooth paper pebble,
jumbled with lint balls, hairpins, that tiny book of instructions.
Forgotten, but sacred.
Offer it back, the seed, the tree.
This is your gift to the valley,
That will make you whole today.
Writer’s Bio:
Eurhi Jones (she/her) has been creating community murals all around Philadelphia for 25 years about nature and climate issues. Natural phenomena, biology, sustainability, and interconnectedness inspire her work. She was the lead artist for the first climate justice mural in Philly, with the Climate Justice Initiative of Mural Arts, collaborating with local artists, environmental activists, and indigenous advocates. In addition to murals, Eurhi works in a variety of media, making paintings, embroidery, and sculpture, usually from repurposed materials. Eurhi received a BA from Wesleyan University and a certificate from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
