The label for our International Women's Day Collaboration was painted by Eddie, Full Circle Taproom's Supervisor. We are so proud of the label and talent Eddie has is absolutely incredible.
Art can touch everyone in different ways, and each piece can draw different interpretations. Eddie's story on what inspired her to create the label is below.
Painting for ‘We Are Here’ - Art In The Age of Connection
As it turns out, collectively naming a beer made by women-of-the-industry for women-of-the-industry, is a difficult task. It was important to all of us involved that we found a name that was just right, and unlike Goldilocks finding her perfect porridge, we had far more than three ideas to choose
from. The name, ‘We Are Here’ came after much cycling through creative suggestions and references; through folklore figures and real-world women, heroes both past and present; through riotous slogans, witches brews, the punchy and the punny. But from all of these names, contrasting
though they were, grew a powerful tenderness. The idea that was to bind us. ‘We Are Here’.
Leading, emerging, unapologetic presence. Together.
The importance of togetherness is something that we have all been acutely aware of over the last two years; spent apart, spent without the power of closeness and fellowship. It isn’t, any longer, a necessity we fail to acknowledge so easily.
We are here to brew a wonderful beer, in an industry overwhelmed by male leadership, and we are here to do it together.
When it came to starting the can design, though, I was a little stumped. If naming the beer had been such a feat, organising all of those ideas into visuals was going to be tough. All of the names that had led us to ‘We Are Here’ had conjured something close to spiritual in the process; difficult to place, and deeply powerful. Frankly, I procrastinated.
A week or so after being asked to design the can, though, I found myself on an acute medical unit after a terrifying health scare, in a hospital I had visited regularly for my late dad, who had been in and out of various wards there over the years. So many wards, in fact, that my mum and I used to, while he slept during visiting hours, walk around the hospital playing a sort of "ward bingo" with how many we had been in. You have to make light of these things, right..?
I had covid at the time, which wasn't why I was admitted, but meant I was on my own in a cubicle room for a week while various scans and tests and obs and procedures whirred on in the background. Very bored on a sunny day, feeling sorry for myself as one does; feeling trapped and frightened, on-my-own, I was watching the trees and their home-birds from the window. The roots that tore through the ground, wrapped and warped around tree trunks, the leaves that bloomed and fell to the moss beds. They were beautiful, strange, but I recognised them as familiar.
I remembered these strange trees: Ward 4, Room 9. And I remembered those numbers. It dawned on me that I had been here before. The same room, but in the wrong seat. I had been here eight years ago, watching my dad fight for the life he loved more than anything. I had been here, together, with him.
It was uncomfortable at first, of course, but quickly became a real comfort. I wasn’t quite so on-my-own, or quite so frightened, anymore. There was a grounding, a rooting, a power in knowing these beeps and machines and nurses and funny meals were something I was sharing with someone I
loved, adult though I now am.
I sketched them, the trees, in the back of my magazine, and started to draw a female figure emerging from the ground - growing like these trees had been doing for so long - uninterrupted.
When I was discharged, in full health and happiness, I came back to the pens and paint brushes with a new-found eagerness to put that feeling onto canvas. We are here. Spirited, rooted, and bursting with the light of life. Together.