Shows
ART FICTIONSSymbolic Prose and Personal Politics (HELEN JOHNSON)Guest artist HELEN JOHNSON
joins JILLIAN KNIPE for this final episode of Series 5, to discuss her work via 'The Birds' by Tarjei Vesaas. Published originally in 1957, then by Penguin Random House in 2019, this short novel describes the relationship between Hege and her younger, mentally challenged brother Mattis. With a sense of non-judgemental simplicity and acute sensitivity, we join the siblings as they negotiate everyday life in partial isolation and on the edge of something happening.
HELEN and Jillian's conversation encompasses lightning, tenderness, siblings, gullibility, hiding, tapestry, holding, frustration, anguish, excavation, metaphors, equality, masking, knitting needles...
2023-12-061h 28ART FICTIONSClosure Difficulties and Performative Reality (ELEONORA AGOSTINI)Guest artist ELEONORA AGOSTINI joins PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her art practice via 'Boxes', a short story featured in 'Elephant and Other Stories' 1998 Collins Harvill. Written by Raymond Carver and originally published in The New Yorker, the story explores connections, disillusion, powerlessness, worry and loss within a mother and son relationship, as well as the distance between listening and hearing.
ELEONORA and Pelumi's discussion encompasses immortality, microcosmos, waitressing, belonging, mothers, self representation, the grid, family frictions, bitter endings, creepy observation, archival images, being deeply uncomfortable, hiding in bushes, multiple layers of meaning, the complicated teenage years, difficulty b...
2023-11-2950 minART FICTIONSSocial Mobility and Beyond Language (MELANIE JACKSON)Guest artist MELANIE JACKSON joins artist JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art practice via 'Corey Fah Does Social Mobility' by Isabel Waidner. Published in 2023 by Hamish Hamilton, part of Penguin Random House, the novel explores binaries, boundaries and borders, freeing us to imagine other ways of being within the context of award winning social mobility, cyclical history, and watching reality TV.
MELANIE and Jillian's discussion encompasses shame, humility, apology, gratitude, wormholes, reconfigured animations, cultural disruption, synthetic biology, persistent amnesia, complicated truths, brutalist architecture, unsustained caretaking, industrial metaphysics, winged penises, synthetic biology, false blaming, clashing ideologies, idealistic social h...
2023-11-101h 17ART FICTIONSRevealing Histories and Gender Variations (JULIET JACQUES)Guest writer and filmmaker JULIET JACQUES joins artist and writer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her creative practice via 'Variations' 2021 by the one and only Juliet herself. Published in 2021 by Influx Press, this book of short stories portrays the mixed, messy and moving lives of transexual women transexual men, non binary, gender queer, cross dressers and inverts, around London, Manchester, Liverpool, Blackpool, Brighton, Belfast, Cardiff and Norwich.
Juliet and Jillian focus on 'Standards of Care' and also discuss humour, poverty, divorce, testosterone, rainbow capitalism, fake tits, ink blot tests, electric shock therapy, alternative Miss World, punk r...
2023-10-241h 02ART FICTIONSUnwavering Sensitivity and Valuing Confusion (ANNA CLEGG)Guest artist ANNA CLEGG joins curator and critic VANESSA MURRELL to discuss her multi-disciplinary art practice via 'My Loose Thread' by Denis Cooper. Published in 2002 by Canongate Books, this claustrophobic novel circulates around teenage Larry who is wrestling with the point of his own existence and explores teen depression, moral vacuity and the confusion of love.
Please be warned that in following the content of Cooper's text, the programme contains references to violence and suicide.
Anna and Vanessa's discussion also encompasses psychedelics, obsession, faux Nazis, feeling violated, animal stickers, unwavering sensitivity, st...
2023-09-291h 05ART FICTIONSAbsent Mothers and Colonised Bodies (OLUKEMI LIJADU)Guest artist OLUKEMI LIJADU joins curator and PHD researcher PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her multi-media art practice through the prism of 'The Stranger' (aka 'The Outsider' aka 'The Foreigner') by Nobel Prize winning writer Albert Camus. Published in 1942, the novella tells of an indifferent French settler who, soon after his mother's funeral, commits the senseless murder of an unnamed Arab man on a Algerian beach. Heralded in the west as a classic text which explores the absurd, their exchange questions the mono-critique which underlies this status, through their personal and uniquely individual experiences. For Olukemi, this is being Nigerian b...
2023-09-131h 10ART FICTIONSSuppressed Voices and Transformative Communities (RORY PILGRIM)Guest artist RORY PILGRIM joins author and critic ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss his musically inspired, community-based art practice through the prism of 'The Bell' by Irish British writer and philosopher, Dame Jean Iris Murdoch. Published in 1958, this funny and sad novel explores religion, human frailty and who has the right to a voice, set within the confines of a lay community.
Please be warned that in following the content of Murdoch's text, the programme contains references to sexual abuse and to suicide.
Rory and Elizabeth's discussion also encompasses unheard voices, sunken voices, historical voices, awoken...
2023-07-141h 11ART FICTIONSWord Play and Multiple Meanings (ANNA BARHAM)Guest artist ANNA BARHAM joins artist JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art practice via 'Companion Piece' by Ali Smith. Published in 2023 by Penguin Books, the novel explores language, meaning, relationships and contemporary politics in what may be seen as a way of bringing a form of conclusion to Smith's urgently written then quickly published, seasonal texts: Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring.
ANNA and Jillian's discussion encompasses disfluencies, purity, transcription software, unfolding meanings, easy solutions, social spaces, silent conversations, showing off, undermining binary, performing language and dog eyebrows. As well as the body in the digital, pushing language around...
2023-06-3056 minART FICTIONSResistance Acoustics and Hopeful Uprising (MIKHAIL KARIKIS)Guest artist MIKHAIL KARIKIS joins poet and art critic CHERRY SMYTH to discuss his art practice via 'Human Acts' by Han Kang, 2016 published by Granta Books. Set in 1980 South Korea, the novel tells the gruelling story of a violently suppressed student uprising and the inevitable fallout from the original trauma.
MIKHAIL and CHERRY's discussion encompasses trust, courage, coalminers, eco-activism, protest and pearl-divers. As well as chance encounters, female superheroes, community collaboration, violent suppression, active listening, self censorship, activist imaginary, heteronormative language, acoustics of resistance, Greek working class, repercussions of trauma, our relationship to the earth, sounds to...
2023-06-1630 minART FICTIONSArbitrary Traditions and Alien Observations (ROSIE GIBBENS)Guest artist ROSIE GIBBENS joins VANESSA MURRELL of DATEAGLE to discuss her art practice via 'Life Ceremony' by Sayaka Murata, 2022 published by Granta Books. This off-kilter collection of short stories brings a grotesque whimsy to fables of cultural norms, including society rituals that develop when the human species is endangered .
ROSIE and VANESSA's discussion encompasses ritual, nothingness, meatarianism, shit and vomit . As well as ribcage tables, mocking Freud, recycling flesh, consuming oneself, anatomical Venus's, muscle suits, pointless products, human hair jumpers, an alien point of view, dried stomach lampshades, humans resembling cockroaches, eating Spongebob figurines, an...
2023-05-2347 minART FICTIONSCultural Fear and Self Permission (CERI HAND)Guest artist mentor CERI HAND joins artist and writer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her creative practice via 'The Blazing World' 2014 by Siri Hustvedt and published by Hodder & Stoughton. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, it tells tales of the life of artist Harriet Burden. Presented across snapshots of journal entries and testimonies by her family, friends and colleagues, the accounts are compiled and edited by academic researcher I.V. Hess after Harriet's death. Furious with the cultural misogyny that's left her all but ignored by the New York art...
2023-05-121h 05ART FICTIONSSecond Bodies and Talking Ice (SUSAN SCHUPPLI)Guest artist SUSAN SCHUPPLI joins art critic and author ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her art practice via 'The Second Body' 2017 by Daisy Hildyard, published by Fitzcarraldo Books. Listed by the 'White Review' on their Books of the Year 2018, the essay presents the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, with an updated dualism between the animal bodies in which we eat, breathe, and sleep and the virtual bodies of our global connections and environmental impacts.
Susan and Elizabeth discuss dissolving boundaries, plausible deniability, beached whales, deep time, gathering poems, chattering glaciers, foetus ownership, critical proximity, living on...
2023-04-2856 minART FICTIONSDisconnected Characters and Contradictory Spiritualism (SOPHIE RUIGROK)Guest artist SOPHIE RUIGROK joins VANESSA MURRELL of DATEAGLE to discuss her art practice via 'Nobody Belongs Here More Than You' 2007 by Miranda July, published by Canongate Books. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, it conveys 16 stories of lonely characters desperately trying to make connections. Their means vary from quirky to the absurd and mostly only result in the disillusion of coinciding in the same space.
Sophie and Vanessa talk about escape, clouds, tears, Buddhism, role playing, manifesting reality, body leaking, collapsing flesh, wearing wigs, cold showers, hypersensitive characters, contemporary spiritualism, movie-set extras, expressing t...
2023-04-1245 minART FICTIONSDark Humour and Watery Figures (NICOLA BEALING)Guest artist NICOLA BEALING
joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Pastoralia' 2020 by George Saunders. Published Riverhead Books, the book contains six short stories each presenting snapshots of contemporary American existence delivered in a deadpan, razorsharp tone, and enshrouded with dark humour.
We talk about dark humour, executions, internal panic, male strippers, 18th century working class fabrics, Goya being God, cruelty, Stasi prison, cave people, hazardous shitholes, bum cracks, lungs filling with blood, penis simulators, pictures popping up behind your eyes, boring objects, unaffordable medical care, apprenticeships, being trapped, funny voices, hot sexy breeding...
2023-03-2355 minART FICTIONSSlow Dancing and Fluid Encounters (FLORENCE PEAKE)Guest artist FLORENCE PEAKE joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her multi-faceted, performance-led art practice via 'Stone Butch Blues' 1993 by Leslie Feinberg. It tells the story of life as a butch lesbian in 1970s, working class America and is particularly unique due to the writer gaining full rights to the text, making it fully accessible online and for free.
Florence and Elizabeth talk about hysterical clay, collapsing paintings, mark-making without sight, rigid heteronormative conventions, the patriarchy's rule which brings a perpetual fear of violence, butch lesbians in the 70s, drag queens, sex workers and femmes, extractions of earthly...
2023-03-0950 minART FICTIONSChannelling Spirits and Excluded Histories (JENNIFER HIGGIE)Guest author JENNIFER HIGGIE joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art writing practice via 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' by Olga Tokarczuk. It's a compelling murder mystery set in a small mountainside village in Poland. As Winter caretaker of neighbouring properties, Janina spends her spare time translating the poems of William Blake into Polish with her friend and ex-student Dizzy.
We talk about how women found agency within the rise of spiritualism, telephoning the dead, art history as a work in progress, tigers of wrath, the golden age of female detective fiction, hanging o...
2023-02-2254 minART FICTIONSRural Reality and Complex Systems (KATIE PRATT)Guest artist KATIE PRATT
joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Once in Europa' 1987 by John Berger. As part of the 'Into Our Labours' trilogy, the novel is set in an alpine village and describes grounded charm and limiting isolation against the encroaching industrialisation of urban life.
We talk about the disorganised surface, organic and geometric, the French Alps, industrial revolution, the mass of strike actions across UK industries right now (and for good reason), a certain lack of idealism, sharing of the planet's resources, how communities might organise themselves, and the myriad of in...
2023-02-0856 minART FICTIONSGender Entrapment and Performative Mythologies (ANNA PERACH)Guest artist ANNA PERACH
joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her work via 'The Victorian Chaise Longue' 1953 by Marghanita Laski. The novel describes the experience of a charming yet childish lawyer's wife who wakes up in the body of her alter-ego eighty years previously. It's a chilling tale of entrapment, which closely links to Anna's sculptural work as she reacts to female stereotypes, trapped in their societal roles, trapped in her tufted wool costumes.
ANNA PERACH
annaperach.com
instagram anna_perach
EXHIBITIONS
2022 Summer group show at Hales Gall...
2022-04-2943 minART FICTIONSCULTURE EXCHANGE - Artistic Protest and Rightful Sovereignty (PAOLA BALLA)Guest artist PAOLA BALLA
joins Jillian Knipe for this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Paola and I discuss colonisation in a place widely known as Australia, and its corresponding cost to herself, her family and her extensively long ancestral lineage, via poet Ellen van Neerven's 'Comfort Food' published in 2016.
We dive into Ellen's magically rich text as she describes the simplest of dishes alongside racist cruelty. Al...
2022-04-0259 minART FICTIONSCULTURE EXCHANGE - Female Resilience and Bodily Playgrounds (INGRID BERTHON-MOINE)Guest artist INGRID BERTHON-MOINE
joins Elizabeth Fullerton for this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Ingrid and Elizabeth discuss the absurdity of male domination within cultural identity via film maker Virginie Despentes' novel 'Kong Kong Theory' published in French in 2006 and English 2010. A mix of memoir, autobiographical essay and manifesto, Despentes shapes outrage and resilience alike, as she introduces her own experience of being gang raped. The novel pitches capitalist p...
2021-12-2148 minART FICTIONSCULTURE EXCHANGE - Ghostly Tales and Artistic Lineage (Richard Ayodeji Ikhide)Guest artist RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE
joins Jillian Knipe for this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Richard and I discuss his disjointed cultural story, via Amos Tutuola's second novel 'The Bush of Ghosts', published in 1954. We follow a young boy, separated from his mother and brother, into a forbidden place of ghostly slavers, violators, friends and foe, as he navigates his way through a foreign land, coming to understand hi...
2021-11-181h 03ART FICTIONSCULTURE EXCHANGE - Human Vessels and Architectural Fragments (NIKA NEELOVA)Guest artist NIKA NEELOVA
joins Jillian Knipe on this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Nika and I discuss the flow of her cultural story, via poet Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge', first published in 1910. We follow Brigge into the depths of the down and out cityscape as he contemplates his fellow street people, acknowledging his urgency to write while being ill-equipped to do s...
2021-10-201h 03ART FICTIONSWelcome to Art Fictions CULTURE EXCHANGE !Welcome and Welcome Back to this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange will run until the end of March 2022. Elizabeth Fullerton and Jillian Knipe will discuss the artistic practices of our guests in the usual way - through the prism of their selected piece of fiction - though, for CULTURE EXCHANGE, there'll be a particular tilt towards cultural identity : the boundaries, hurdles, opportunities and possibilities which both curb and ope...
2021-10-1602 minART FICTIONSMechanical Bodies and Dissected Detritus (HOLLY HENDRY)Guest artist HOLLY HENDRY
joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to chat about her work via Tom McCarthy's 2005 novel 'Remainder' in which the nameless narrator must re-learn body movements after a debilitating accident. He is awarded a ridiculous sum in compensation which he uses to re-enact past happenings in microscopic detail, increasingly absurd and violent in nature.
Holly is a lot more pleasant. However, she is also compelled to open up the surface of objects to discover what's inside. How things work. And when that cannot be done physically, it is explored as an idea.
Elizabeth a...
2021-09-3055 minART FICTIONSShadowy Nuance and Colourful Movement (FIONA GRADY)Guest artist FIONA GRADY
joins me to chat about her work via Jun'ichirō Tanazaki's 1933 essay 'In Praise of Shadows'. The text describes eastern aesthetics being driven by the west, resulting in the loss of Japanese tradition and the loss of the shadow.
Fiona Grady and I discuss her own praise of shadows, working with semi translucent colours on glass, wall murals and watercolours which celebrate subtlety, reflection and the elusiveness of the object of which, I'm quite certain, Tanazaki would approve.
FIONA GRADY
fionagrady.co.uk
instagram fion...
2021-09-1455 minART FICTIONSEdged Forms and Rhythmic Waves (HANNAH HUGHES)Guest artist HANNAH HUGHES
joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to chat about her work via Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel 'The Waves'. Not so much a story as a stream (or perhaps, more accurately, a wave) of consciousness, the book is classified as an experimental fiction. It describes the thoughts of six characters through soliloquies, whose lives all pivot around the muted Percival.
Hannah and Elizabeth then open up the artist's practice as collages, cuts and slide-throughs of shadowy forms and real edges. They track how shapes are formed from in-between spaces around objects and the body, how multiple pr...
2021-07-2954 minART FICTIONSEmbodied Violence and Persistent Ambivalence (LUKE BURTON)Guest artist LUKE BURTON
joins me to chat about his work via Ben Lerner's 2019 novel 'The Topeka School'. The story revolves around Adam Gordon and his parents, and the ambivalence of language as both a pathway to reparation and a driving force towards violence.
Luke Burton and I go on to discuss his own ambivalence, working with and against male and masculine archetypes in Western art. We acknowledge the ability of psychotherapy to excavate knowledge you didn't previous have about yourself, the selective access to language, the aggression within public rhetoric and language as spells. ...
2021-07-061h 09ART FICTIONSBold Resilience and Rightful Restoration (KAREN McLEAN)Guest artist KAREN McLEAN
joins Elizabeth Fullerton to chat about her work via Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel 'The Underground Railroad' published by Doubleday. The historical fiction tells of 19th century slaves Cora and Caesar and their attempts to escape to freedom in America's south west.
Starting with her intensely researched art practice, Karen McLean and Elizabeth explore stories of rebellion and suffering amongst individuals and the collective, including female power, body ownership, intergenerational identity, mental illness and a vast knowledge of plants used as a method of resistance. They also delve into the structural l...
2021-06-1151 minART FICTIONSContemplative Cracks and Lo-Fi Tech (DEAN KENNING)Guest artist DEAN KENNING
joins me to chat about his work via John Maxwell Coetzee's 2013 allegorical novel 'The Childhood of Jesus'. The story revolves around five year old David with his father-by-default Símon, on their quest to find a mother for the boy and a better life for the three of them.
Winner of this year's prestigious Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, Dean Kenning, and I go on to discuss his clunky sculptures, social body-mind maps and his philosophical mish mash 'Metallurgy of the Subject'. We delve into the cracks between the flatness to explore id...
2021-05-241h 16ART FICTIONSSeductive Feathers and Brutal Beasts (KATE MccGWIRE)Guest artist KATE MccGWIRE
joins Elizabeth Fullerton to chat about her work via American wildlife scientist Delia Owens' 2018 novel 'Where the Crawdads Sing'. In an ode to the beauty and violence of nature, the story centres around wild "marsh girl" Kya Clark. Abandoned and isolated from childhood, young Kya relies on nature to teach her the basics of survival as well as deluding her that one day she will be rescued. Interaction with other humans provides a whole different set of support and threatening challenges.
Identifying with Kya's barefoot 'n' wild soul, Kate Mc...
2021-05-1042 minART FICTIONSMeandering Mourning and Collaged Reality (FIONA CURRAN)Guest artist FIONA CURRAN
joins me to chat about her work via Esther Kinsky's 2020 novel 'Grove : A Field Guide'. The story is directed by a narrator who takes a trip to a village on the outskirts of Rome which was supposed to be an adventure with her recently deceased partner.
Fiona and I go on to discuss how the work of her current solo exhibition developed during lockdown and a nasty bout of covid, as well as an earlier, major outdoor installation. We expand on landscape as a character, contemporary poetry, a balance of...
2021-04-231h 10ART FICTIONSTheatrical Forms and Shifting Times (LINDSAY SEERS)Guest artist LINDSAY SEERS
joins Elizabeth Fullerton to chat about her work via Russell Hoban's 1980 novel 'Riddley Walker'. A child of sorts in a futurist, post-nuclear explosion setting which harks back to the iron age, far from walking, the narrator Riddley is on the run. His patriarchal heritage has deemed him 'connexion man' and alongside his role of puppeteer, interpreter and propaganda pusher, Riddley begins to uncover the truth of past cleverness which is officially prohibited under religious conjecture. He throws himself to the dogs and together they journey through danger and forbidden knowledge in a...
2021-03-3157 minART FICTIONSEarthly Nourishment and Landscape Potential (LIZ ELTON)Guest artist LIZ ELTON
joins me to chat about her work via Max Porter's 2019 novel 'Lanny'. The story revolves around a young boy named Lanny and his disappearance in the setting of an English village bordered by a forest. Little lad Lanny is as captivating as his author's ability to envelope us deep within the seams of the village's social and ecological networks, where Dead Papa Toothwort oversees all, over all time.
Bouncing off nature and infinite ephemerality, Liz and I go on to discuss her work selected for the John Moores Painting Pr...
2021-03-1055 minART FICTIONSMakeshift Staging and Might Happens (MILLY PECK)Guest artist MILLY PECK
joins me to chat about her work via Alan Ayckbourn's play 'Taking Steps - A Farce'. Published in 1981 by Haydonning Ltd and first performed at Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1979, the story revolves around a Victorian manor house in faltering disrepair. While the characters upstairs and downstairs their way around three storeys, the play is actually performed on only one floor so that various scenes interact simultaneously. It's then a cacophony of mishaps, misunderstandings and misdirections. Elizabeth wants to leave Roland. Roland wants to buy this tremendous house from Leslie for Elizabeth. Mark wants...
2021-02-2347 minART FICTIONSWelcome to 2021 with a special Guest Host !Join this year's guest host Elizabeth Fullerton and myself as we map out what's happening with Art Fictions this year, including Culture Exchange, Elizabeth's book on the YBAs, 24 Hour Hitchcock, psychiatric illness, fragmented compositions, personal and environmental narratives, sexuality, gender, race, queer, cis, boobs and cupcakes !
instagram artfictions2020 and jillianknipe2020
website jillianknipe.co.uk
instagram elizabethfullerton
website elizabethfullerton.co.uk
ARTISTS, BOOKS, GALLERIES
'ArtRage : The Story of the Brit Art Revolution' 2016 hardback with paperback due out Autumn 2021
Christina Quarles
Douglas Gordon...
2021-02-1508 minART FICTIONSCECILIA CHARLTON (and Italo Calvino)American artist Cecilia Charlton selects two short stories by Italo Calvino: 'A Sign in Space' and 'The Origin of the Birds'. Both stories focus on the very inception of what comes into being and what we now take for granted - signs/signals/artworks as well as birds/the other/evolutionary rejects. All the while, 'A Sign in Space' draws extraordinary parallels with an art practice. From the anxieties of creating something new to the egotistic punchiness of asserting authenticity, we join Qfwfa who journeys throughout space and time, pontificating on what it is to create and leave a...
2020-12-2457 minART FICTIONSHANNAH BROWN (and WH Auden)Hannah Brown selects the small but beautiful poem by WH Auden ‘As I Walked Out One Evening'. Written in 1937, it is preoccupied with questions of the eternal, focussing on love versus time. It travels through younger days and the excitement of new loves to a more settled life, when kisses are replaced by health, when the focus of wondering is on how things may have been different and culminates in one’s final moments.
HANNAH BROWN
hannahbrown.co.uk
Hannah Brown, confirmed British landscape painter, introduces us to her love of fiction, reading excer...
2020-12-0946 minART FICTIONSDANIEL STURGIS (and Nicholson Baker)Daniel Sturgis selects two books by American author Nicholson Baker - his first novel 'The Mezzanine' published in 1988 and 'Room Temperature' in 1990. Both portray the mindful meanderings of the protagonist, from tender moments to an astonishing level of detail, often with a good dollop of amusement. In 'The Mezzanine', we spend a lunch hour with Howie as he fixates on the micro-details of staplers, Scotch tape, escalators and an assortment of other office paraphernalia, as well as his family, returning continually to his astonishment that both his shoelaces have broken within days of one another. 'Room Temperature' takes place...
2020-11-2645 minART FICTIONSFRANCES RICHARDSON (and Virginia Woolf)Frances Richardson selects two short texts by Virginia Woolf - 'The Mark on the Wall' published in 1917 and 'Solid Objects' in 1918. Both begin with a black dot which becomes a jumping off point for musing about the structures and systems which govern our livelihoods. The first text has the narrator enjoying their own wondering about the identity of the mark on the wall, pulling away from the dreariness of logical thinking, championing instead, the inventiveness and possibilities in imaginative thinking. While the second text revolves around two politicians, one of whom finds a piece of smoothed glass at the...
2020-11-1246 minART FICTIONSJANE HAYES GREENWOOD (and Maggie Nelson)Jane Hayes Greenwood selects 'The Argonauts' by Maggie Nelson. Published in 2015, it is a whirlwind fusion of contemporary queer theory, autobiography, philosophy, art, motherhood and, perhaps best of all, a beautiful love story.
JANE HAYES GREENWOOD
janehayesgreenwood.com
ARTISTS, THINKERS, PUBLICATIONS
Ambit Magazine
Dana Schutz
D W Winnicott
Edward Burra
Emma Cousin
Esther Leslie
Harry Dodge
Jane Gallop
Kristian Day
Lindsey Mendick
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Melanie Ja...
2020-10-3050 minART FICTIONSGRACE WOODCOCK (and Octavia Butler)Grace Woodcock selects 'Mind of my Mind' by Octavia Butler. Published in 1977, it details the development of a new species of telepaths led by Mary, a mixed-race young woman raised in poverty. In our conversation, we discuss what distinguishes Octavia Butler as a unique sci-fi voice as we focus on Grace's debut London solo exhibition GUT-BRAIN at Castor, exploring the ideas behind her research-led practice around the body, mind, tech, science and alternative medicine.
0:00-0:20 Summary of the book 'Mind of my Mind', wondering how to make the book into a movie, afro-futurism, what it m...
2020-10-1455 minART FICTIONSEMMA COUSIN (and Jean-Paul Sartre)Emma Cousin selects the seminal novel 'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre. Published in 1938, it describes Antoine Roquentin's existential crisis which plays out in the library, streets and cafes of Bouville, which literally means 'mud town'. In a world devoid of God, lacking in meaning, Antoine shrinks further and further inside himself as he struggles in his search for purpose, finally deciding the best use of his life is to write a really critical book. Like 'Nausea' I guess ! In our conversation, we focus on Emma's post-lockdown solo show at Goldsmith's CCA, though her ideas - from biology to geometry...
2020-10-011h 23ART FICTIONSCHARLEY PETERS (and Charlotte Perkins)Dr Charley Peters selects ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Published in 1892, it was inspired by the author’s own experience of post natal depression and the resulting inappropriate treatment she battled against. The short story describes one woman’s descent into madness as she is overtaken by the yellow wallpaper she loathes. Her supposedly devoted husband keeps her isolated in a room, based on the authority of a nasty little cluster of so called expert mental health physicians including his learned self. This only worsens her condition. Charley identifies with the main character’s need for stimulation, for creati...
2020-09-151h 08ART FICTIONSJORDAN BASEMAN (and Patricia Highsmith)Welcome back to Art Fictions ! Jordan Baseman selects ‘Strangers on a Train’ by Patricia Highsmith. Published in 1950, the book tells of Bruno and Guy who happen meet on a train and, between whiskies and cigarettes, Bruno suggests they swap murders. I’ll kill your pesky wife if you kill my horrid father. Seems fair though somewhat macabre, not at all the sort of thing a nice young woman from Texas ought to be writing about and very much against the law. What starts badly ends even worse as the double murders lead to Bruno drowning in the sea and Guy dr...
2020-09-021h 07ART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - ALICE BROWNE (and Luciana Chetwynd)In this final episode of Series 1, Alice Browne selects 'Seawater and the Dragon' by Luciana Chetwynd and the Chetwynd Children. Published in 1973, the children's book tells of a feared dragon and his monster buddies who find an ally in naughty boy Seawater, and together, they all go on to become darlings of the village. As a painter of measured inaccuracies, Alice identifies with the book's wobbly illustrations, their over the top colours and contradictory perspectives. Along with the narrative, she too brings fantasy and reality onto the same surface, as well as a range of devices which explore how...
2020-07-2051 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - TOM WILMOTT (and William Peter Blatty)Tom Wilmott selects 'The Exorcist' by William Peter Blatty. Published in 1971, the novel portrays the wildly disturbing behaviour of 12 year old Regan, whose mother seeks help from a plethora of medical specialists until, in desperation, she arranges a priest to perform an exorcism of her daughter to cast out the devil. In a fascinating and deeply personal reading of the book, Tom sees the devil as a stand in for depression. We discuss the lengths to which he has shaped his practice in a dedicated effort to keeping his own destructive side at bay and maintain mental wellness. Resulting...
2020-07-1356 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - ANDREA V WRIGHT (and Edwin A Abbott)Andrea Wright selects 'Flatland : A Romance of Many Dimensions' by theologian, schoolmaster and Anglican priest Edwin A Abbott. Published in 1884, the novella tells a story of geometry and the pettiness of the class system in equal tones of giggly satire and eye rolling dismay. We venture into Andrea's Irish ancestry and the shifts throughout her family's history, as well as her own vast experience from jazz singer to fashion stylist. She is an artist dedicated to the act of doing. Her reading of philosophy wouldn't make sense without the physical making and experimentation that is essential to her practice...
2020-07-0652 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - HANNAH LUXTON (and Rebecca Solnit)Hannah Luxton selects 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' by Rebecca Solnit, published by Canongate Books in 2005. We join the author’s drunken debut and travel with her to extremes at the western edges of America as she explores a myriad of geographical, ancestral and metaphysical ways of getting lost. Picking up on Rebecca’s fascination with the elusiveness of blue - the colour of where you are not and where you can never go - Hannah’s work is particularly spurred on by the sublime; that which is beyond knowledge. She describes her American road trip, her obsession with I...
2020-06-2954 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - SIMON LININGTON (and Simon Linington!)Simon Linington, visual artist and story writer, has selected his own fiction for this episode. ‘Evangaline Too’ was originally published in New York’s ‘Sunday Salon’ zine and creates an intriguing viewing platform for our conversation. We probe the meticulous details of smoking, worms, dirty water and so on, as Simon grasps at that which is readily available. Dreams, travel and memories feed his writing. Dust and detritus, his installations. He shares some of the backstories to the development of his work at London sites including William Benington Gallery, Castor Projects, Lily Brooke, Division of Labour and Brooke Benington in Mexico...
2020-06-2252 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - GRANT FOSTER - part two (and JG Ballard)Grant Foster and I pick up where we left off, discussing connections between his work and J G Ballard's 1970 novel 'The Atrocity Exhibition'. Considering Ballard often referred to parallels with painters, it seems natural that an artist might return the gesture, drawing on this author to feed his own practice. In this episode, Grant talks about eternal life, use of the motif and painting as a sequence of gestures where reality is founded in the ideas which follow the forms.(Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
Notes a...
2020-06-1531 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - GRANT FOSTER - part one (and JG Ballard)Grant Foster selects 'The Atrocity Exhibition' by J G Ballard, first published by Jonathan Cape UK, 1970. Both artist and writer embrace in equal measure the freedom, fear and disappointment that results from the individual being a fragmented composition, vulnerable to manipulation and capable of dynamic reconfiguration. In hope and despair, Grant points out that there is the possibility that 'true form' can be found 'beneath the lie; beneath the sludge'. We discuss in detail, works from his exhibitions at Tintype, Lychee One and Transition Galleries, as well as the ideas, concerns and formal observations which shape his paintings.(Mixed...
2020-06-0847 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - ROSALIND DAVIS (and John Berger)Rosalind Davis - artist, curator, author, educator - and I weave in, out and around her paintings, installations and the mysterious diaries of Hungarian painter Janos Lavin from 'A Painter of Our Time' 1958 by John Berger. Rosalind details the decision to build her own art community and the many branches of her practice which have developed as a result. (Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
ROSALIND DAVIS
rosalinddavis.co.uk (website)
rosalindnldavis (instagram)
rosalinddavis (twitter)
'Irreversible Entanglements' 2020
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2020-06-0149 minART FICTIONSMixed Tapes - Welcome to Art Fictions !Lockdown has given the unharmed among us, opportunities, doubts and challenges in equal measure. The first 'Art Fictions' series, using a mixed bag of equipment, is a buzzing start to a down-to-earth podcast exploring creative connections between fiction and fine art. Each artist shares insights and inspirations around fictional themes and teenage dreams, and this podcast would not be possible without their imagination and their work. Thanks to them. And thanks to you for listening. Episode 1 is a brief overview of how the podcast is constructed. Design and illustration are by Joanna Quinn at Beryl Studios. The music is...
2020-05-2602 min