RUSSH Media has launched a limited-edition book to celebrate the publication’s 20th anniversary.
Try To Catch It is a commemorative work that showcases the voices of Australian creative minds. It features excerpts from interviews conducted over the past two decades and words shared exclusively with the publication, bound together into one volume representing the creative heartbeat of our generation and community.
Writers, poets, actors, musicians, artists, designers, curators and image-makers: many multi-disciplinary, most appearing time after time within our pages and platforms. While some are household names, and others are emerging talents, all are equally revered within our community for the contributions they make to culture and independent thinking. All have been part of the evolution of RUSSH.
“Human creativity is something of a mystery: it cannot always be accessed on demand, and with it often comes a sense that it is fleeting, and possibly even utopian,” said Jess Blanch, editor-in-chief and publisher of RUSSH Media.
“In Try To Catch It this is what we wanted to capture. The sometimes untouchable yet optimistic spirit that comes with creativity.”
The artists in these pages have the courage to take up space: they fight self-doubt, the dilemma of originality and that dream-killer known as fear. It’s an immense undertaking to have the ingenuity to pour your soul into form. But at the core, their art is universal, telling stories of the human condition.
Try To Catch It shares words from musicians like Troye Sivan and Genesis Owusu; visual artists including Otis Hope Carey and Archibald winner Julia Gutman; design minds Christopher Esber and Jordan Dalah; authors Lamisse Hamouda and Winnie Dunn; and icons Phoebe Tonkin, Mary Fowler and Gemma Ward.
“What’s particularly striking – when these artists speak of the creative impulse, they’re all looking for a way to see the world as they’ve never seen it before,” says Blanch. “To create for the eyes of others is more than bravery, it is radical optimism.”
While RUSSH Media has published this book to mark a special chapter and to celebrate the legacy of the arts in Australia, this book came during a time of great opposition, but through it all, the artists stayed true. In such times, it is the artists, poets and writers among us that forge ahead as an act of resistance – creating and expanding existing paradigms through an abstract pursuit of profound-over-practical.
