Chris Ferric

Savers Footscray Residency

Jinghua Qian writing about Savers in the furniture section of Savers having eir portrait painted onto a used framed canvas from Savers (2025)

Acrylic on canvas, mystery paint, price tag, receipt

A receipt from Savers stapled next to a wood-framed canvas of Jingua Qian. Inside the frame, pink, beige and green blocks are evenly spaced over a white unprimed canvas. Over the top of these blocks, in the middle of the canvas, Jinghua is seated in a carved wooden armchair looking at their laptop. The impression of eir restless movements, like visual echoes, are messily painted next to eir head and elbows and shoulders. There are impressions of sections of objects in the background, a bike wheel, some books, a fire extinguisher. Hanging over the top left corner of the painting is a price tag for $4.49 from Savers - the original tag for the canvas.

As part of Jingua Qian’s brand-new site-specific work for Footscray West Writer’s Festival “From The Belly of The West”, where ey took up a ramshackle writers-in-residence program in the furniture section of Savers.

Qian chose this existing, un-primed canvas painting of triangles in the furniture section of Savers for Ferric to paint on. Ferric began this in-person, in Savers, while Jingua worked.

Photo of Chris Ferric seated in wheelchair, leaning on their half-finished painting of Jingua Qian. There is a stool with painting supplies and a dirty water bottle next to them. The background is the inside of Savers Footscray, with a rack of clothing and shelf of bric-a-brac