ART FICTIONS: Recent Episodes
Jillian Knipe
ART FICTIONS is published monthly and was created by artist and art writer Jillian Knipe. Each guest artist selects a piece of fiction, which we both explore, then use as a lens through which to view their artwork. We delve into the book‘s themes, context and characters, which opens up and steers a rich conversation about the artist‘s practice. The podcast bounces back and forth between art and text, all the while focussing on the ideas which govern both. It is a way of talking alongside art, rather than directly at it, getting close and personal with the origins of artistic ideas.
Follow @artfictions2020 Instagram for images of works and links, and see the podcast notes for all the references mentioned.
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, dream worlds, shattered trees, portals, body punctures, art therapy, white supremacy, honest thieves, cartography lines, blinding flies, Oedipus complex, intergenerational privilege, psychotic structure, architectural blueprints, birthing shit, monetising colonialisation, not being othered, the weight of the work, creating a space for healing, writing being like a drawing, and a lot of Lacanian psychotherapy - a real learning experience !
HELEN JOHNSON
helenjohnson.net
'Opening' Pilar Corrias Savile Row til 6 Jan 2024
'Agency' Pilar Corrias 2019
'Warm Ties' ICA 2017
ARTISTS
Aleksandra Waliszewska
Aliza Nisenbaum
Bridget Riley
Christina Quarles
Denzil Forrester
Fred Williams
Georgiana Houghton
Joy Labinjo
Judy Watson
Katie Pratt
Laura Owens
Maja Ruznic
Marcus Coates 'The Directors' Artangel
Melanie Jackson
Nicole Eisenman
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Paola Balla
Rosie Mullan
Shanti Panchal
Yhonnie Scarce
AUTHORS + BOOKS
Darian Leader 'The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression' 2008
Jackie Wullschläger 'Monet: The Resless Vision' 2023
Jennifer Higgie 'The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World' 2023
Karl Ove Knausgaard
National Gallery of Australia 'Know My Name: Australian Women Artists Since 1900' 2021 Part 1 2022 Part 2
CURATORS + ART HISTORIANS
Helen Molesworth 'Dialogues' David Zwirner
Sarah McCrory
THEORISTS + ANALYSTS + ACTIVISTS
Anna Freud
Donald Winnicott
Jacques Lacan
Joy Shaverien
Melanie Klein
Meriki Onus
Sigmund Freud
Shirley Sharon-Zisser 'What Would a Lacanian Art Therapy Look Like'
Walter Benjamin
Wilfred Bion
GALLERIES + ART INSTITUTIONS
Glasgow International
ICA Institute of Contemporary Art
Kunstverein in Hamburg
Kingsgate Project Space
Latrobe University
MCA NSW Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
NGV National Gallery of Victoria
Pilar Corrias
SeMA Seoul Museum of Art
Tate Galleries
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 bringing closure to relationships, connections between pictures and performance, and not wanting to be the dictator of the image.
@eleonoraagostini
eleonoraagostini.com
Foam Talent 2024-2025
Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2019
'A Study of Waitressing'
'A Blurry Aftertaste' 2018
'Laying with Strangers'
'Welcome Sir'
'How to Stand in Front of the Camera'
'How to Stand in Front of the Client'
'Notes for my Clients'
'The Steps'
@pelumi.odubanjo
ARTISTS
Olukemi Lijadu
Ragnar Kjartansson
WRITERS
John Cheever
Raymond Carver
GALLERIES & INSTITUTIONS
Barbican
Borough Road Gallery 'With Monochrome Eyes' 2020
Palais de Tokyo
Royal College
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 housing, nano scale engineering, vulvas on horseback, ridiculing the middle class, colonialisation of language, pig fat in ice cream, what art can do as an experience, and the way histories and future technologies bounce off one another.
MELANIE JACKSON
@melanie.jjj
melaniejackson.net
'Rouge Flambé'
'Deeper in the Pyramid | Share of Throat'
'Spekyng Rybawdy'
'The Urpflanze'
ARTISTS + CURATORS + ACADEMICS
Esther Leslie
Ezra Lloyd Jackson
Kirsten Cooke
Nicole Eisenman 'Bambi Gregor' 1993
Olukemi Lijadu
Pelumi Odubanjo
BOOKS + MAGAZINES + WRITERS
Brian Massumi 'What Animals Teach Us About Politics' 2014
Charles Darwin 'On the Origin of the Species' 1859
Eileen Myles 'Afterglow: A Dog Memoir' 2017
Franz Kafka 'The Metamorphosis' 1915
'Frieze' magazine
Goethe 'Die Urplanze' ('The Metamorphosis of Plants') 1829
Isabel Waidner ' Sterling Karat Gold' 2021
Jo Orton
John Lahr 'Prick Up Your Ears' 1978 (film 2007)
EXHIBITIONS + INSTITUTIONS
Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth
Banner Repeater, London
Block 336, London 'Spekyng Rybawdy' 2022
Grand Union, Birmingham
Matt's Gallery, London 'Mattflix'
Max Mara Prize
Jerwood Drawing Prize
San Mei Gallery, London 'Rouge Flambè' 2023
Wellcome Collection, London 'Living with Buildings' 2018-2019
Wellcome Collection, London 'Milk' 2023
Whitechapel Gallery, London
FILM + TELEVISION
'The Nasty Girl' 1990
'Top Boy' 2011-2023
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 rock gender play, friendship in the face of prejudice, making objects that cannot be sold, itchy balls of wool for breasts, fresh meat advertising slogan, interest in post communist countries, the importance of questioning how people pay the rent and the disappointment of greater understanding not necessarily bringing about greater tolerance.
JULIET JACQUES
julietjacques.com
'Monaco' Toothgrinder Press 2023
'Variations' Influx Press 2021
'Trans: A Memoir' Verso Books 2015
'Transgender Journey' 2010-2012 The Guardian
'Suite 212' 2017-2021 Resonance FM
'Revivification: Art, Activism and Politics in Ukraine' 2018
ARTISTS
Boris Mikilov
Cecilia Sjoholm
David Goymer
Deborah Tchoudjinoff
Garth Gatrix
Hatty Buchanan
Iain Hales
Laura Moreton-Griffiths
WRITERS
Susan Stryker 'Transgender History' 2008
MUSIC
Genesis
Joy Division
Man Enough to be A Woman (Jayne County)
New York Dolls
NME magazine
Sex Pistols
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Siouxsie Sioux
The Fall
The Roxy
Wayne County and The Electric Chairs
FILM + TV
Adam Curtis 'Can't Get You Out of my Head' series 2021 BBC
Bill Grundy 'Today' 1968-1977
Derek Jarman 'Jubilee' 1978
Hattie Jacques 'Carry On' series 1958-1992
Oksana Kazmina, camera and editor
Josh Appignanesi 'Female Human Animal' 2018
EDUCATION + INSTITUTIONS
ICA London
Somerset House Studios
The Royal College
POLITICS + MOVEMENTS
Black Lives Matter
Femen 2008 Ukraine founded by Anna Hutsol, Alexandra Shevchenko, Oksana Shachko
Gay Liberation Front
Margaret Thatcher for Section 28
Revolution of Dignity 18-23 Feb 2014 Ukraine
ReSew - Kyiv based feminist sewing cooperative
Viktor Yanukovych
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, stupid imagery, internal rhyming, Santa Claus, swimming through mud, looping back on oneself, eyes being gummed shut, the value of confusion, dark and disturbing worlds, begrudging awareness of the reader, not being able to fathom the logic of decision making, writing through an idea rather than creating a story, and the steampunk weaponisation of ice skates.
Please!
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Recorded at Cubitt Community Radio by Andi Armishah
Music GRIFFIN KNIPE
Production consultant LORI E ALAN
Logo JOANNA QUINN of BERYL PRODUCTIONS
ANNA CLEGG
relevant-confluences.com
'Half Truths' curated by Vanessa Murrell til 30 November 2023 at Unit 2 Cassia Building 97-101 Hackney Road Shoreditch London E2 8ET
ARTISTS
David Musgrave 'Lambda' 2022
James Turrell
John Baldassari 'Wrong' 1967
Joseph Cornell
BOOKS + MAGAZINES + WRITERS
Artforum magazine
Barry Pierce 'Another Magazine'
Beatrice Forster
Brett Eastern Ellis
Denis Cooper 'The George Miles Cycle' series 1989-2000
Denis Cooper 'I Wished' 2021
Elliot Jeffries
Frieze magazine
George Bataille 'Story of the Eye' 1928
Hervé Guibert 'Ghost Image' 2014
Interview magazine
Kathy Acker
Katja Kemnitz 'Too Much Love' on Tumblr
Nour El Saleh
Paul Auster
Roland Barthes 'An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative', 1975
Spin magazine
Tao Lin 'Leave Society' 2021
Tom of Finland
Victory Burgin 'Remembered Film' 2004
Vivian Sobchack
William Burroughs
MUSICIANS + FILM
Brooke Shields
Claire Denis, director and screenwriter
Larry Clark 'Bully' 2001
NLE Chopper
Terence Stamp
Xaviersobased
GALLERIES + ORGS
Chelsea School of Art
Greengrassi
Nicoletti Contemporary
Split Gallery
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 born and raised, where she was educated in the British system, going on to study philosophy at Stanford, USA. While Pelumi is British with Nigerian heritage.
Olukemi and Pelumi's discussion also encompasses psychoanalysis, philosophy, elusive racism, European critique, American critique, contradictory affection, self knowledge, segregated Algeria, compilation of memory, disregard for women, disregard for black people, anonymous Arab characters, ancestors speaking in the first person, the presence of absent women, who can make claims of objectivity, who can make claims of the absurd, women fading from the novel as male desire for them fades, the assumption that one must divorce one's positionality from how they engage with work for their opinion to be valid, the black woman as photographer and therefore narrator, as well as the radicalised and colonised body.
Please support the production of this podcast via https://www.patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST
Contact Art Fictions via artfictionspodcast@gmail.com
Follow Instagram @artfictionspodcast
OLUKEMI LIJADU
olukemilijadu.com
insta @kemlij
contact@kemkemstudio.com
'Guardian Angel' commissioned by ICA 2022
ARTISTS + EXHIBITIONS
Atong Atem
Kahlil Joseph 'BLKNWS' 2018 ongoing
Theaster Gates
Wura-Natasha Ogunji
'A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography' at Tate Modern til 14 Jan 2024
'Genetic Automata' by David Blandy and Larry Achiampong at Wellcome Collection til 11 Feb 2024
BOOKS + AUTHORS + FILM
Frantz Fanon
Fred Moten 'Black and Blur' 2017
Harper Lee 'To Kill a Mockingbird' 1960
James Baldwin 'The Fire Next Time' 1963
Jane Austen 'Pride and Prejudice' 1813
Lola Olufemi
Paul Gilroy 'The Black Atlantic' 1993
Saidiya Hartman 'Lose Your Mother' 2006
Saint Omer 2022 director Alice Diop
Timothy Ogene 'Seesaw' 2021
Toni Morrison
MUSICIANS
Aretha Franklin
Bob Marley
Christopher Williams
Frankie Knuckles
Lee Scratch Perry
Rokia Traoré
Whitney Houston
GALLERIES + INSTITUTIONS
Sanford University
Institute of Contemporary Art
Tate Modern
V.O Curations
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 voices, shutting down voices, empathy, songwriting, drawing, poetry, kissing, dancing, stories, transformation, spiritual striving, moral dilemma, social practice, closet homosexuality, transformative moments, nuns getting naked and writing off people who are too complicated. They also delve into the toxic politics of speech, wrestling with faith, music as a first language, pathways of self destruction, the stress of being part of communities, suppression leading to the harm of others, the desire and courage to learn and to listen, experiences shaped by nuance and interconnections, and ways in which direct democracy can be built on consensus and intergenerational dialogue. And together, they question: how can you be completely yourself within a group, how can we imagine new forms of law through storytelling, and how can art play a civic role in transforming lives and developing networks of care.
Please support the production of this podcast via patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST.
Contact Art Fictions via artfictionspodcast@gmail.com or instagram @artfictionspodcast.
RORY PILGRIM
rorypilgrim.com
insta @rainbowsofgorse
'Turner Prize' at Towner Eastbourne 28 Sep 2023-14 Apr 2024
'Rafts' 2020 The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art in Zurich, EVA International 31 Aug – 29 Oct 2023 Limerick city of Ireland, 49 Nord 6 Est Frac Lorraine in Metz of France
'The Undercurrent' 2019
'The Resounding Bell' 2018
ARTISTS
Abba 'The Visitors' 1981
Barbara Hepworth
Evelyn Taocheng Wang
Helen Cammock
Ilona Sagar
Jane Jeffcot
Mel Brimfield
Ragnar Kjartansson 'The Visitors' 2012
Robyn Haddon
Sands Murray-Wassink
Sonia Boyce
Susie Green
BOOKS + AUTHORS
Lucy Lippard 'Mapping the Terrain: New Genre in Public Art' 1994
Suzi Gablik 'The Re-enchantment of Art' 1991
Toni Morrison 'Beloved' 1987
Toni Morrison 'Song of Solomon' 1977
Toni Morrison 'The Bluest Eye' 1970
GALLERIES + MUSEUMS + ORGANISATIONS
Auto Italia
Chisenhale Gallery
Green Shoes Arts
Interfaith Sanctuary, Boise, Idaho
Serpentine Gallery 'Radio Ballads' 2022
Site Gallery
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, stories being questions, and the pain of a pain within another body.
Please support the production of this podcast via patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST.
And you're welcome to contact the team directly on artfictionspodcast@gmail.com and follow what's happening on Instagram @artfictionspodcast.
ANNA BARHAM
annabarham.net
insta @banana_harm
apria.artez.nl/zyx
'Magenta Emerald Lapis' 2009 The Tanks in Tate Modern til 10 Sep 2023
'Stilled Images' Tube Gallery in Palma Mallorca til 6 Aug 2023
ARTISTS
Laura Owens
Lindsay Seers
Moyra Davey
Nicola Bealing
Sophie Ruigrok
William Blake
WRITERS + BOOKS
Ali Smith 'The Accidental' 2005
Ali Smith 'How to be Both' 2014
Anna Barham 'Return to Leptis Magna' 2010
Anna Burns 'Milkman' 2018 voiced by Brid Brennan
Bridget Crone
Cherry Smith
Claudia Rankin
Elizabeth Fullerton
Gertrude Stein
Gustave Flaubert 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' 1874
Nick Cave
Jennifer Higgie
Russell Hoban 'Ridley Walker' 1980
Judith Butler
Lisa Robertson 'The Baudelaire Fractal' 2020
Lisa Robertson 'Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship' 2018
Lisa Roberton 'Cinema of the Present' 2014
Plato 'Cratylus' 360BCE
GALLERIES + ORGANISATIONS
Banner Repeater
bookshop.org
Chelsea College
Flat Time House
Large Glass Gallery
401 Contemporary
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 engender change, giving over artistic power, speaking on behalf of the dead, sound as a sculptural material, a tsunami of screaming, plus being out of tune with ourselves, our social context and the environment.
Please support the production of this podcast via patreon.com/artfictionspodcast.
And you're welcome to contact the team directly on artfictionspodcast@gmail.com and follow what's happening on Instagram @artfictionspodcast.
MIKHAIL KARIKIS
Greek-British artist based in London & Lisbon, working in video, sound and performance.
mikhailkarikis.com
@mikhailkarikis
'Because We Are Together'
National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens 28 Jan - 8 Oct 2023
'The Weather Orchestra' 2023
'Ferocious Love' 2020 Tate Liverpool as recommended by Laura Cumming in 'The Guardian'
'I Hear You' 2019
'No Ordinary Protest' 2018
'The Chalk Factory' 2017 Aarhus Denmark, commissioned by European Capital of Culture
'Sounds from Beneath' 2011-2012
CHERRY SMYTH
'If the River is Hidden' co-authored with Craig Jordan-Baker
'Famished'
ARTISTS + MUSEUMS + PRACTITIONERS
Ceri Hand
HOME Manchester
Mathilda Bevan
Tate Liverpool
The Granary Gallery
Thelma Hubert Gallery
The Showroom
Whitechapel Gallery
BOOKS + AUTHORS + WRITERS
Alison Branagan 'The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers' 2011
Hartmut Rosa 'Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World' 2021
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, and to borrow Rosie's words, it's all kinda dark and kinda beautiful .
ROSIE GIBBENS
rosiegibbens.com
@rosiegibbens
ARTISTS + CURATORS
Becca Pall-Fry
Helen Chadwick
Marcel Joseph
Mike Stubbs
BOOKS + WRITERS
Albert Camus
Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' 1932
Angela Carter
Barbara Creed 'The Monstrous Feminine' 1993
Julia Kristeva
Megan Milks 'Slug and Other Stories' 2021
Perfume
Steven King 'Carrie' 1974
FILM
'Alien' 1979
'Evil Dead II' 1987
'Ex Machina' 2015
'Hellraiser' franchise
'RAW' 2017
'The Human Centipede' 2009, 2011, 2015
GALLERIES + EXHIBITIONS
GIANT 'Body Poetics' 2023
Museum of the Home
Pictorum Gallery
The Bomb Factory
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 world, Harriet hides her identity behind three male fronts in a series of exhibitions. While their huge success goes to prove her point, when she finally unmasks herself, not everyone believes her.
CERI HAND
cerihand.com
@cerihand
artistmentor.co.uk
ARTISTS
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff 1935–2020
Eva Hesse 1936-1970
Evlyne Laurin, Creative Legacy Steward and Fine Art Appraiser
Jane Hayes Greenwood
Sir Horace Shango Ové CBE
Yayoi Kusama
Zak Ové
WRITERS + BOOKS
Cherry Smyth
Dan Sullivan with Dr Benjamin Hardy '10X is Easier than 2X: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less' 2023
John Milton 'Paradise Lost' 1667
John Steinbeck 'Of Mice and Men' 1937
Margaret Lucas Cavendish 1623-1673
Rachel Cusk
INSTITUTIONS + GALLERIES
Castor Gallery
ICA
Somerset House 'Get Up Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers' 2019
The Women's Art Library 'Make' magazine
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 ice, images creating barriers, Princess Diana's wedding dress, bodies eating distance, and changing paradigms. Plus, they question where environmental knowledge resides and which modes of representation might inspire action.
SUSAN SCHUPPLI
susanschuppli.com
@susan_schuppli
'Cruel Radiance' Backlight Festival, Finland - June 2023Art & Industry Triennial, Dunkerque France - June 2023'Re/Sisters', Barbican London 5 Oct 2023 - 14 Jan 2024LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Spain 'Material Witness''Can the Sun Lie'
'Cold Rights'
'Freezing Deaths''Weaponising Water''Icebox Detentions''Listening to the Ice' 2023 EVENTS 'Earthrise' is a photograph of Earth and some of the Moon 's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on 24 December 24 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission.
Ultrasound was first used for clinical purposes in mid 1950s but not used widely in British and American hospitals till 1970s for foetus imaging.
In April 1965, 'Life' put a photograph called Foetus 18 Weeks on its cover which caused a sensation. The issue became the fastest-selling copy in the magazine's entire history.
The Keeling Curve is a graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii from 1958 to the present day.
BOOKS + THINKERS
Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, American academic, Professor of English Literature and Black Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada
Daisy Hildyard 'The Footprint's Story: Princess Diana's Jewels and Carbon' Orion magazine, Winter Issue 30 Nov 2022
Dr Adrian Lahoud, Dean of the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Joseph Conrad
Silvia Federici 'Caliban and the Witch: : Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation' 2004
Sven Oskar Lindqvist 'Exterminate all the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide' 2007
Sheila Watt-Cloutier 'The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet' 2015
Ursula K Le Guin 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' 1986
FILM + DIRECTORS
Chantal Akerman
'Nostalgia for the Light' Patricio Guzmán, 2010
Stanley Kubrick '2001: A Space Odyssey' 1968
ORGANISATIONS
Bergin Kunsthalle, Norway
Berlin Biennale
Forensic Architecture
Goldsmiths University
Sculpture Center, New York
Toronto Biennial of Art
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 the psyche, masks as mediators, disconnected lonely people, swimming on the carpet, beautifully weird realisations about humanity, the loss of fantasy, appropriating from art history, being allergic to the world, true signs of falsehood, and Sophie using her fingers to make images of fingers before dipping her toe into oil paint.
SUPPORT this podcast via patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST
SOPHIE RUIGROK
@sophie.ruigrok
'In Three Acts' Huxley Parlour 27 April - 27 May 2023
'Stilled Images' Tube Gallery, Mallorca opens 10 June 2023
ARTISTS
Alfred Stieglitz
Andrea Mantegna
Francis Bacon
Gian Lorenzo Bellini 'The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa' 1652
Hans Memling, hellscapes
Jan and Hubert Van Eck 'The Ghent Alterpiece' Belgium 1432
Katarina Caserman
René Magritte
GALLERIES
Marlborough 'Love is the Devil: Studies after Francis Bacon' 2022
Tabula Rasa 'It's Better to be Cats Than be Loved' 2022
The Sunday Painter 'Today I Feel Relevant and Alive' 2022
WRITERS
Carl Jung
Susan Stewart 'On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection' 1984
FILMS
'Interstellar' 2014
'The Truman Show' 1998
'Thelma and Louise' 1991
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 age, slogans of false hope, bags of human waste, hiding what's underneath and the tiny details that make up a life.
PLEASE SUPPORT this podcast via https://patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST
NICOLA BEALING
nicolabealing.co.uk
@nicola_bealing
'The Borough' at Matt's Gallery London 15 March - 16 April 2023
ARTISTS
Alice Browne
Alice Neel
Benjamin Britten
Erich Heckel
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Francisco Goya
George Grosz
Hieronymus Bosch
Montagu Slater
Otto Dix
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Sidney Nolan
BOOKS + AUTHORS
Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' 1932
Broadside Ballads
E M Forster
Federico Garcia Lorca 'Blood Wedding' 1932
'Face' magazine
George Crabbe 'Peter Grimes' Letter XXII of 'The Borough' 1810
George Saunders 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life' 2021
GALLERIES + MUSEUMS + GALLERISTS
British Museum
Foundling Museum
Museum of Cornish Life (Helston)
Royal Cornwall Museum (Truro)
Salisbury Art Centre
Tim Dixon
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 matter and energy, the dance floor as a space for belonging and expression, splattering the audience with clay, tenderness and care, finding comfort in the face of shame, and encountering ourselves imaginatively in relationship to objective reality.
Please support this podcast via patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST
FLORENCE PEAKE
florencepeake.com
insta florence_peake
Richard Saltoun Gallery
2023 16 April - 2 July 'Factual Actual Ensemble' at Southwark Park Galleries then touring to Fruitmarket Gallery and Towner Gallery
2023 11 Feb - 7 May 'Earth Spells: Witches of the Anthropocene' at RAM Museum, Exter with Caroline Achaintre, Emma Hart, Kris Lemsalu, Mercedes Mühleisen, Grace Ndiritu, Florence Peake, Kiki Smith, Lucy Stein
2023 18 Feb - 6 May 'Body Poetics' at Giant, Bournemouth with Penny Slinger, Helen Chadwick, Florence Peake, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Charlotte Edey, Enam Gbewonyo, Rosie Gibbens, Guerrilla Girls, Evan Ifekoya, Ad Minoliti, Senga Nengudi, Niki De Saint Phalle, Carolee Schneemann, Tai Shani, Kiki Smith, Rae-Yen Song, Holly Stevenson curated by Marcelle Joseph and Bella Pelly-Fry
2021 Factual Actual at National Gallery
2021-22 Crude Care for British Art Show at Aberdeen Art Gallery then touring UK
2019 Apparition Apparition at Venice Biennale
2018 RITE: on this pliant body we slip our WOW! at De La Warr Pavillion
2015 Voicings for Block Universe at Modern Art Oxford, Somerset House
ARTISTS + PERFORMERS
Cameron Armitage
Carolee Schneeman 'Meat Joy'
Donald Judd
Emma Hart
Eve Stainton
Fabian Peake
Igor Sravinsky 'The Rite of Spring'
Gabi Agis
Grayson Duitu
Jo Moran
Jordan McKenzie
Kate Bush
Lee Bowie
Lindsey Kemp
Mercedes Grower
Michael Clarke 'I am a Curious Orange'
Rosemary Butcher
Siobhan Davis Studios
Tai Shani
The Fall
Yvonne Rainer
BOOKS
Juliet Jacques 'Variations' 2021
Carmen Maria Machado 'In the Dreamhouse' 2019
Octavia Butler
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 out in Greece, bridge builders, astrology, precognitive dreams, human cruelty, climate crisis, bad writers, ghosts, eccentricities that make complete sense, taking your brain with all of its complications wherever you go, and Jennifer's passion for histories of exclusion, particularly those of women.
SUPPORT this podcast via https://www.patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST
JENNIFER HIGGIE
jenniferhiggie.com
instagram jennifer_higgie
BOOKS + AUTHORS + PUBLISHERS
Agatha Christie
Annie Besant 'Thought Forms' 1906
Brian Dillon 'Affinities' 2023
Dorothy L Sayers
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Georgio Vasari 'The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects' 1550
Griselda Pollock
Hetty Judah
Jennifer Higgie 'The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World' 2023
Jennifer Higgie 'The Mirror and the Palette' 2021
Jennifer Higgie 'Bedlam' 2006
J M Coetzee 'The Childhood of Jesus' 2013
Katie Hessel
Linda Nochlin
Madame Blavatsky
Margary Allingham
Michael Bracewell 'Unfinished Business' 2023
Orion Publishing Group
Virginia Woolf
William Blake
ARTISTS
Dean Kenning
Donna Huddleston 'Brighter' 2021
Frances Richardson
Georgiana Houghton
Helen Johnson
Hildagard of Bingen
Hilma af Klint
Homer 'Odyssey' 1614
Kazimir Malovich
Katie Pratt
Margo Neale
Mary Wigman
Paul Klee
Richard Dadd 'The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke' 1855-64
Sarah Lucas
Tracy Emin
Wassily Kandinsky 'Composition V' 1911
GALLERIES + MUSEUMS + CURATORS
Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich 'Dada'
Camden Arts Centre 'Making and Unmaking' 2016
Duo Olowu
Hugh Lane, Dublin
Margo Neale, First Nations Curator, Museum of Australia, Canberra
Modernity, Stockholm
MUMA, Monash University, Melbourne
Simon Lee, London
Tate Britain
Tate Modern 'A Year in Art: Australia 1992'
The Box, Plymouth 'Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters'
OTHER
BBC3 'The Essay' Jennifer Higgie 'Artists and the Spirit World'
Emanuel Swedenborg
Frieze magazine
Jennifer Higgie scriptwriter 'I Really Hate My Job' 2007
Lucracia Dalt
Marie Curie
Mark Tanner Award
Thomas Edison
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 invisible, and often complex systems, that structure our lives and Katie's paintings.
PLEASE SUPPORT this podcast via https://www.patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST
KATIE PRATT
katiepratt.net
instagram katiepratt_artist
'Reverse Parking' curated by Katie Pratt and Peter Lamb, 23 Feb - 12 Mar 2023 Thames-side Studios Main Gallery with Gordon Cheung, Will Cruickshank, Cristallina Fischetti, Oona Grimes, Paul Hosking, Peter Lamb, Katie Pratt
BOOKS
'A Painter of Our Time' 1958 John Berger
'Ways of Seeing' 1972 John Berger
'Why Look at Animals' 2009 John Berger
ARTISTS
Andrew Bick
Franz Haus
Jonathan Parsons
Johannes Vermeer
John Bunker
Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner
L S Lowry
Matt Dennis
Nan Goldin
Peter Lamb
Rosalind Davis
Vera Mulnár
Wassily Kandinsky
Willem de Kooning
OTHER
'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' 2022
Guggenheim, New York
'Jean de Florette' 1999
Karl Marx
Tate Galleries, London
Thames-side Gallery and Studios
Turps Painting Course
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
'Ways of Seeing' 1972 BBC
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 Gallery 2022 'Eye of the Collector' Cook Latham Gallery 24 Mar - 30 Apr 2022 'Spidora' Edel Assanti 2020 'Tomorrow London' White Cube 2020 'Seven Wives' graduation exhibition at Goldsmiths
ARTISTS Alice Neel Anousha Payne Dorothea Tanning Leonora Carrington
BOOKS
Clarissa Pinkola Estes 'Women who Run with the Wolves' Barbara Creed 'The Monstrous Feminine' Griselda Pollock 'After affects After Images' Frederico Campanja 'Technic and Magic' GALLERIES & ORGANISATIONS ADA Gallery, Rome Arco, Madrid ADA, Milan Cook Latham Gallery Goldsmiths College Ingram Art Prize Mother Art Prize Ryder Gallery
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. All with the upper hand of calm reflection and a delicious dollop of sensuality.
Paola is extremely generous in sharing her stories of Indigenous hardship which she relays with clarity, humour and warmth . Our conversation expands on Paola's art practice which includes sculptural installation, curation and academia. We hear of the nature of bush dying and the shocking reality of forced encampment of her people, which continued into recent history. Paola shares her take on the mythological Mok Mok with her wild hair and no underwear, as she serves up well meaning treats in track pants and stilettos.
PAOLA BALLA
paolaballa.art
instagram paola_balla
EXHIBITIONS
'Treaty' 2021
'Wilam Biik' 2021
WORKS
'Banner Time' 2021
'Murrup (Ghost) Weaving in Rosie Kuka Lar (Grandmother's Camp)' 2021
'Unconditional Love Space' 2020
BOOKS & WRITERS
Ellen van Neerven 'Comfort Food'
ARTISTS
Vernon Ah Kee
Madeleine Kelly 'Spectra of Birds' 2014-2015
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 patriarchy as the true villian; exploiting both men and women, forcing us into rigidly codified, disempowering roles and behaviours that serve the unending cycle of global capitalism.
The conversation sharpens with painful, frustrated outrage and bubbles with giggles around the flop, juice, willy and boobies of genitalia. Ingrid describes her strongly feminist art practice that includes men as she probes ideas around masculinity including her 'I Lack it, I Like it' is instagram project in response to the stupidity of Freud's concept of penis envy.
INGRID BERTHON-MOINE
ingridberthonmoine.com
instagram ingridberthonmoine
instragram lackitlikeit
EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS
'Hand-Held' 2021 co-curated with Holly Stevenson
'Lack It , Like It' ongoing on instagram
'You Tear Us' 2018 solo exhibition at Kelder Projects
'Looking at a Lack of Perspective' 2017
BOOKS, AUTHORS & FURTHER READING
Byung-Chul Han 'The Disappearance of Rituals'
Camille Froidevaux-Metterie
Camille Paglia
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 'Herland'
Grace Jones
Hettie Judah
Eileen Miles
Etel Adnam
Holly Stevenson
Judy Chicago
Maggie Nelson 'The Argonauts'
Ocean Vuong 'On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous'
Paul B Preciado 'Testo Junkie'
Sitt Marie Rose
Ursula K Le Guin
Virginie Despentes 'King Kong Theory'
ARTISTS & EXHIBITIONS - mentioned and admired -
Barbara Walker
'Georgia O'Keefe' Centre Pompidou, Paris
'Life Between Islands' Tate Britain
'Magnus Plessen' White Cube
Marcia Michael
'Nicola Tyson' Sadie Coles
'On Hannah Arendt' Richard Saltoun Gallery
Wilma Woolf 'Domestic'
ARTS ORGANISATIONS
Goldsmiths
Mark Tanner Sculpture Award
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 his sense of rightfulness and identity.
We go on to discuss Richard's formative years in Nigeria, a country whose name itself is stained with the nasty history of colonial subjugation. He speaks of his paternal lineage, steeped in story telling, from an area of the world, rich with artisans and stolen artworks. His world suddenly changes in his teens when he and his brother arrive in the UK to live with his mother. At this point, his own negotiation in a new land begins.
Our conversation expands on Richard studying drawing and textiles, and researching mythologies, semiotics, rituals, archetypes and visual systems. He describes the courses he's developed at The Royal Drawing School which attempt to inform students about the global lineages of and connections between imagery, representations and artistic practices across different cultures. His observations uncover the unexpected around petroglyphs, nazca lines and stone tablets of the ancient past to glass tablet phones and emojis of the high tech present.
RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE
instagram pandagwad
EXHIBITIONS
February 2022 - Galerie Bernhard in Zürich
WORKS
'Awon Osere' 2020 watercolour and ink on paper
'Contemplating with Effigies' 2020 oil on wood
PODCAST
The Compendium Podcast with Dexter Orszagh
BOOKS & WRITERS & SCREEN
Alejandro Jodorowsky & Juan Giménez 'The Metabarons' or 'The Saga of the Metabarons'
Alex Grey 'The Mission of Art'
Amos Tutuola 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'
Amos Tutuola 'The Palm Wine Drinkard'
Carl Jung 'Man & His Symbols'
Erich Neumann 'The Origins and History of Consciousness'
Joseph Campbell 'Hero with a Thousand Faces'
'Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myths' Netflix
Simon Blackburn, philosopher
'Spirited Away'
'Tales by Moonlight' Nigerian Television Authority
ARTISTS
El Greco
Giacometti
Giotto
Picasso
William Blake
COUNTRIES & CULTURES & HISTORIES
Ancient Greece
Benin Empire 1440 - 1897
Benin Expedition : Or the Benin Punitive Expedition in February 1897. Invasion of the Kingdom of Benin by the British Empire. After which Benin was absorbed into colonial Nigeria. Approx 2,500 religious artefacts, mnemonics and artworks were taken by Britain, including the Benin Bronzes, then around 40% were given to the British Museum.
Benin Bronzes : A collection of metal plaques and sculptures created by the Edo people from the 13th century onwards, which once decorated the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin. Over 1,000 items were taken by the British as part of the Benin Punitive Expedition.
Biafra War 1967 - 1970 : Civil war between Nigerian government and the Republic of Biafra.
Brazil
Christianity
Cuba
Egypt
Ghana
Ifá gods
Igbo people
Mesoamerica
Nigeria
Sabongida-Ora, Edo state
Yoruba
ARTS ORGANISATIONS
British Museum
Central Saint Martins
National Gallery
The Royal Drawing School
Zabludowicz Collection
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 so.
We go on to discuss the constant country hopping of her childhood. Back then, architectural details became more reliable than the passing parade of friends, schools, neighbourhoods and languages. So she now mines these ideas for her studio practice where architectural details are re-purposed and renewed, creating unexpected sculptural forms, drifting back, forth and around in meaning and time.
Our conversation taps into overlapping past and future, finding modes to retrieve, drifting in and out of focus, slipping through time, panic spasms, hypersensitivity, and reality, experience and stories overlapping to become an indiscriminate montage.
EXHIBITIONS
2022 '(Everything) is Not What it Seems' NITJA Museum, Oslo
25 Nov 2021 - 7 Jan 2022 'b bl b' Garage off-site project, Moscow
10 Nov 2021 - 30 Jan 2022 'Not Painting' Copperfield, London
22 Oct 2021 - Dec 2022 'Silt' Brighton CCA
11 Sep 2021 - 20 Nov 2021 'One of Many Fragments : Edward Allington and Nika Neelova' New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury
NIKA NEELOVA
nikaneelova.com
instagram nikaneelova
ARTISTS
Ana Mendieta
Andrei Tarkovsky (film director)
Barbara Hepworth
Emma Cousin
Eva Hesse
Eva Rothschild
Fra Angelico
Holly Hendry
Jane Hayes Greenwood
Louise Bourgeois
Phyllida Barlow
Rachel Whiteread
Piero della Francesco
BOOKS & WRITERS
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 'The Mushroom at the End of the World'
Annie Ernaux 'The Years'
Donna Haraway 'Staying with the Trouble'
Edmund de Waal 'The Hare with the Amber Eyes'
Henrik Ibsen (playwright)
Maggie Nelson 'The Argonauts'
Manuel DeLanda 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History'
Margaret Atwood 'The Testaments'
Martin Heidegger 'The Basic Problems of Phenomenology'
Max Frisch 'Man in the Holocene'
Jean Paul Sartre 'Nausea'
Ocean Vuong 'On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful'
Rainer Maria Rilke 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'
Susan Sontag 'The Volcano Lover'
Tibor Fischer 'The Collector Collector'
Tom McCarthy 'Remainder'
Tom McCarthy 'Satin Island'
Virginia Woolf 'The Waves'
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 open up the artist's practice, as a result of their sense of culture being upended or especially challenged in a way that is unique to each life story.
instagram artfictions2020, jillaroo2020, fullerton_eliz
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 and Holly discuss her major recent, current and upcoming exhibitions:
Jan 2022 solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
29 May - 12 Nov 2021 'Invertebrate' De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
May 2021 - Mar 2023 group exhibition 'Breaking The Mould, Sculpture by Women since 1945 An Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition, for venues refer to artscouncilcollection.org.uk/exhibition/breaking-mould-sculpture-women-1945
Oct - Mar 2022 group exhibition 'Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules' Somerset House, London
19 May - 30 Aug 2021 'Indifferent Deep' De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Sep 2019 - Apr 2020 'The Dump Is Full of Images' Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
HOLLY HENDRY
hollyhendry.com
instagram h.ollyh.endry
stephenfriedmangallery.com
ARTISTS & DESIGNERS
Andy Holden
Astrida Neimanis
Helen Turner, E-Werk Luckenwalde, Berlin
Isamu Noguchi
Le Corbusier
Louise Bourgeois
Rebecca Horn
BOOKS & AUTHORS
Albert Camus 'The Stranger'
Beatriz Colomina 'X Rays in Architecture'
Eric Carle 'The Very Hungry Catepillar'
J G Ballard 'The Drowned World'
Maggie Nelson
Miles Orvell 'The Real Thing'
Rebecca Tamas 'Strangers : Essays on the Human and Nonhuman'
Tom McCarthy 'C'
GALLERIES & ASSOCIATES
De La Warr Pavilion
Liverpool Bienniel
Professor Parick Goswami, University of Huddersfield
Royal College of Art
Selfridges
Somerset House
Stephen Friedman Gallery
The Baltic
The International Necronautical Society
Whitehall Fabrications
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
FILMS & PERFORMERS
Buster Keaton
Pauline Oliveros
Robert De Niro
'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'
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 fiona_grady
'Close to Home: The Everyday Sublime' JGM Gallery til 25 Sep 2021
'Kaleidoscope Prisms' Canary Wharf til end October 2021
'The Factory Project' October 2021
upcoming at The Foundry Gallery 2022
ARTISTS & CURATORS
Alfred Hitchcock
Anna Lytridou
Anne Veronica Janssens
Beatriz Milhazes
Ben McDonnell
Bridget Riley
Charley Peters
Daniel Buren
David Batchelor
Eric Thorpe
Félix González-Torres
Fumio Asakura
Gordon Matta-Clark
Hannah Luxton
James Turrell
Jane Hayes Greenwood
Julie F Hill
Linda Hemmersbach
Nick Stavri
Poppy Whatmore
Sol leWitt
Tim Ralston
Vivienne Maier
Yukako Shibata
BOOKS
Haruki Murakami 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' 1985
Leonard Koren 'Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers' 1984
Maggie Nelson 'The Argonauts' 2015
GALLERIES & ART ORGANISATIONS
Artist's Support Pledge
Asakura Museum of Sculpture
Bauhaus
Derix Glasstudios, Germany
JGM Gallery, London
Kevin Gauld Architecture
Leeds Arts University
Nightingale Arts
'Passengers' Residency, The Brunswick Centre
Projekt
Recreational Grounds
Sid Motion Gallery
The Art Station, Suffolk
The Foundry Gallery
White Conduit Projects, London
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 processes distance the form from its source, the invention of visual language and the importance of fragmentations which create a sense of the whole.
ARTISTS
Al Loving Ana Mendieta Eva Hesse Trisha Brown Yvonne Rainer
BOOKS
Amy Sillman 'The Shape of Shape' 2019 zine and MoMA exhibition Hilma Af Klimt 'Notes and Methods' 2018 Jess Chandler, Aimee Selby, Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot, published by Prototype (editors) 'Intertitles: An anthology at the intersection of writing and visual art' 2021 Marina Abramovic 'Walk Through Walls' 2017 Roxana Robinson 'Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life' 1999 Yvonne Rainer 'Feelings Are Facts' 2016
PODCASTS
'Talk Art' Russell Tovey and Robert Diamant 'Chats with Artists in Lockdown' Emma Cousins 'Sound and Vision' Brian Alfred 'Great Women Artists' Katy Hessel
GALLERIES
Sid Motion Gallery
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.
LUKE BURTON
lukeburton.tumblr.com
bosseandbaum.com/artists/luke-burton
instagram luke_p_burton
'Impossible Weather' solo exhibition 2020 Bosse and Baum
'The Artist Oracle' Sep 2021 White Crypt
ARTISTS & ARTWORK
Coptic Textiles
Donald Judd
Hans Holbein the Younger
Lee Krasner
Neil Cummings
'Rebel Without A Cause' 1955 film
BOOKS & WRITERS
Adam Phillips 'Attention Seeking' 2019
Ben Lerner 'Leaving the Atocha Station' 2011
Ben Lerner '10:04' 2014
Ben Lerner 'Contest of Words' Harper's Magazine 2016
Harriet Lerner, clinical psychologist and author
Isabel Hardman 'Why We Get the Wrong Politicians' 2018
Lidija Haas 'The Guardian' 4 Nov 2019
Owen Jones 'The Grammar of Ornament' 1856
Rachel Kusk 'Outline' 2014 'Transit' 2016 'Kudos' 2018
GALLERIES & ORGANISATIONS
Barbican Gallery, London
Girton College, University of Cambridge
Victoria and Albert Museum V&A
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 legacies created by the sugar, cotton and indigo industries; colonialism, covert operations, syncretic religions, and the rise of the blue devil.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
KAREN McLEAN
instagram karenmclean_art
karenmclean.co.uk
'Blue Power' 2021 Block 336
'Ar'n't I A Woman' 2021 Block 336
'The Precariat' 2017 Lewisham Arthouse
ARTISTS
Anish Kapoor
Donald Judd
Doris Salcedo
El Anatsui
Eva Hesse 'Contingent' 1968
Gees Bend Quiltmakers, Alabama
Ibrahim Mahama
Joseph Beuys
Kara Walker
Louise Bourgeois
Paul Goodwin
Sheila Gowda
Teresa Margolles
Theaster Gates
Tracey Emin
BOOKS ACTIVISTS THEORISTS
Alan Krell 'The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire' 2002
Alice Walker 'Everyday Use' 1973
Bell Hooks 'Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism' 1981
Deborah Grey White 'Ar'n't I A Woman' 1985
Edward Said (Professor of Literature, Columbia University)
Emily Zobel Marshall 'Anansi's Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance' 2012
Harriet Tubman, 'Harriet' film 2019
Hilary Beckles 'Natural Rebels' 1989
Homi Bhabha 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse' 1984
Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyst)
Sojourner Truth (abolotionist, women's rights activist) 'Ain't I A Woman' speech 1851
Toni Morrison 'Beloved' 1987
GALLERIES LOCATIONS RESOURCES
Afterprojects, Julie Bentley
Birmingham City University
Black Cultural Archives, Brixton UK
Block 336, Brixton UK
Gees Bend Quilting Retreat
Goldsmiths University of London UK
King's Cross Station, London UK
Shakespeare's House, Stratford UK
The Gale Plantation, Jamaica, Caribbean
The New Art Gallery, Walsall UK
The Steamhouse, Birmingham UK
Trinidad & Tobago, Caribbean
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 ideas around satire, proliferation, bad infinity, socialist utopia, universal modes of seeing the world, common language, allegorical imagery, the importance of the father, avoidance of composition, a dislike for kinetic work, redundant technology, history as a bloody struggle and poo in sausages.
(This episode is produced by Jillian Knipe with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
DEAN KENNING
deankenning.com
instagram Dean Kenning notfairbear
'The Origin of Life' 2019
'Psychobotanical' 2019 Matt's Gallery
'Renaissance Man' 2017
'Metallurgy of the Subject' ongoing
ARTISTS
Antony Gormley 'Angel of the North' 1998
David Bowie (musician)
Emma Cousin 'Chats in Lockdown' podcast
English Heretic (musicians)
Hieronymus Bosch
Kiki Smith 'Her Memory' Fundació Joan Miró
Leonardo da Vinci 'Vitruvian Man'
Paul McCarthy 'Painter' 1995
BOOKS & THEORISTS
Benjamin Markovits (writer)
C L R James 'The Black Jacobins' 1938
Colm Tóibín 'The Testament of Mary' 2012
Franz Schubert (composer)
Immanuel Kant (philosopher)
J M Coetzee 'Disgrace' 1999
J M Coetzee 'Waiting for the Barbarians' 1980
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 'Erlkönig' 1782
Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyist)
Jean Fisher (professor, art critic, writer)
Jean-Luc Nancy 'The Inoperative Community' 1986
John Roberts (philosopher) 'Dean Kenning's Kinetics' 2019
Jorge Luis Borges 'Three Versions of Judas' 1944
Joyce Carol Oates 'My Life as a Rat' 2019
Karl Marx
Kazuo Ishiguro 'The Buried Giant' 2015
Plato 'Republic' 375BC
Russell Hoban 'Riddley Walker' 1980
Susan Buck-Morss (professor, philosopher, historian)
William Burrows (writer)
William Morris 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' 1885
Walter Benjamin (philosopher)
William Playfair (engineer)
TELEVISION
'Day of the Triffids' from 1981
'Dr Who' from 1963
Kenny Everett
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 MccGwire and Elizabeth Fullerton share stories of herons, crows, eagles, magpies, blackbirds, turkeys, pheasants, tropicbirds and the confounding snobbiness around pigeons and doves who are both part of the Columbidae family. They go on to explore snakes, oozing, gushing, skin, bones, intestines and scrotum' as well as darkness, resilience, rapture, seductions, repulsion, calm, turbulence, obsessiveness, working intensely, choir singing and Kate achieving a distinction for her dissertation at the Royal College despite being dyslexic.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
KATE MccGWIRE
katemccgwire.com
instagram kate_mccgwire
'Cavort' 2020
'Sluice' 2009
'Sominal' 2019
ARTISTS & DESIGNERS & PERFORMERS
Akram Khan
Berlinde de Bruyckere
Doris Salcedo
Eva Hesse
Helen Chadwick
Helmut Lang
Hermès
Lancelot 'Capability' Brown
Mona Hatoum
Robert Adam
Thomas Chippendale
BOOKS
Annie Proulx 'Barkskins' 2016
Douglas Stuart 'Shuggie Bain' 2020
Khaled Hosseini 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' 2007
Margaret Atwood 'Dearly: Poems' 2020
Tim Winton 'The Shepherd’s Hut' 2018
GALLERIES & ART DESTINATIONS
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
Grand Palais Éphémère 'Art Paris' 2021 contemporary art fair
Harewood House, Leeds
The Lowry, Manchester
SERIES
'It’s a Sin' written by Russel T Davies
MUSIC
Benjamin Britten 'Peter Grimes' 1945
Henry Purcell 'Hear my prayer, O Lord' 1682
Henry Purcell 'Lord, How Long Wilt Thou Be Angry'
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 bleak and beauty, loss of identity through grief, looking for solace in the landscape, loving everything Italian, beyond the optical, seduction of the screen, the colour blue, extreme fatigue, memory flooding into the present, sanitisation of nature, resurfacing, fragmentation, aimlessness, hovering, disorientation and losing a sense of self.
(This episode is produced by Jillian Knipe with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
FIONA CURRAN
fionacurran.co.uk
instagram fiona_curran
'Jump Cut, Still Life' solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery
'Your Sweetest Empire is to Please' outdoor installation at Gibson Estate
ARTISTS
Anna Maria Garthwaite
Anni Albers
Florence Peake
Fra Angelico
Gunta Stöltzl
Hannah Luxton
Hélio Oticica
Henri Matisse
Lindsay Seers
Lygia Clark
Lygia Pape
Mary Heilman
Raoul De Keyser
Sonia Delaunay
BOOKS
Anne Truitt 'Daybook : The Journal of an Artist' 1982
Esther Kinsky 'River' 2014
Jeremy Cooper 'Bolt from the Blue' 2021
Joanne Kyger 'The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964' 1981
Linda J Lear 'Rachel Carson : Witness for Nature' 1994
Rachel Carson 'Silent Spring' 1962
Rebecca Solnit 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' 2005
GALLERIES
Bosse & Baum
Broadway Gallery, Letchworth
THEORISTS & BOTANY
Gibside Estate
Kew Gardens
Mary Eleanor Bows 1749-1800
Mary Wollstonecroft 1759-1797
Paul Virilio 1932-2018
FILM
Michelangelo Antonioni 'Red Desert' 1964 starring Monica Vitti
Pier Paolo Pasolini 'The Hawks and the Sparrows' 1966 'Notes Towards and African Orestes' 1970
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 story held together by a fragmented new language.
Layering ideas and various time zones, Lindsay Seers and Elizabeth Fullerton explore imposter syndrome, hunger for power, problems with articulation, excess of language, confusion, the puppet who overwhelms the puppetmaster, the search for new forms of artwork, becoming a camera, character instability, non normative brains, compassion, discomfort, connections, coincidences, blips, misunderstandings, signs, traces, unknown causes, unknown effects, mass hallucination, states of becoming, constant evolution, multitude of narratives, grand historical narratives, personal history, quantum theory, quantum biology, metaphysics, unified consciousness, the impossibility of identifying origin, and eye gouging.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
LINDSAY SEERS
lindsayseers.info
instagram lindsayseers1
'Entangled'
'Every Thought There Ever Was'
'Nowhere Less Now'
The following references are mentioned on Podcast Episode 22 or suggested by guest artist Lindsay Seers :
AUTHORS & BOOKS
Anthony Burgess 'A Clockwork Orange' 1962
Arto Paasilinna
Brian Massumi 'What Animals Teach Us About Politics' 2017
EE Cummings
Frances Yates
Gerard Manley Hopkins
James Joyce
Jim Al-KKhalili & Johnjoe McFadden 'Life on the Edge : The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology' 2014
Jeremy Cooper 'Bolt From the Blue' 2021
Kevin Breathnach 'Tunnel Vision' 2019
Lindsay Seers 'Human Camera' 2007
T S Eliot
Virginia Woolf
THEORISTS
Benjamin Libet - Libet's Clock
Carl Jung, psychiatrist
Giles Deuleuze
Henri Bergson
Jacques Lacan, psychoanalyst
John Dee
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Samuel Barclay Beckett, novelist and playwright
ARTISTS & GALLERIES & ART ORGS
Artangel
Derek Jarman 'Jubilee' 1978
Ewerk, Berlin
Fabrica Gallery, Brighton UK
Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea UK
Hospitalfield Gallery, Arbroath, Scotland UK
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton UK
MONA (Tasmania), Australia
Nine Elms site, Matt's Gallery, London UK
Robin Klassnik, Matt's Gallery, London UK
Sharha Art Foundation, UAE
Sursock Museum, Lebanon
Tate, London UK
TELEVISION & FILM
Everything by Adam Curtis (English documentary filmaker)
'The Bridge' series 2011
'The Fly' film series
'The Quartermass Experiment' series 1953
'Twin Peaks' series 1990
'Twin Peaks : The Return' series 2020
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 Prize as well as her upcoming residency with the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust. We talk of the constant state of becoming, nourishment, self care, delicate touch, bruising, translucency, landscape, lightness, mortality, composting, ritual, recycling, equality, silk thread, internal shadows, wastage, potential, breakdown, food labour and that fragile layer of soil on which all life depends connecting with our own skin.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
LIZ ELTON
lizelton.com
instagram liz_elton
'John Moores Painting Prize' exhibition at Walker Art Gallery
'Flowers of Romance' group exhibition at White Conduit Projects
ARTISTS
Alice McCabe
Allyson Keehan, curator
Angela de la Cruz
Dillwyn Smith
Din Q Lê 'The Colony' 2016
Eliza Bennett
Elizabeth Murton
Eric Ravilious
Francisco Goya
Jem Finer 'Longplayer' at Trinity Buoy Wharf, longplayer.org
Johannes Vermeer 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' 1665
Julie F Hill
Katharina Grosse
Mark Rothko
Michael Landy 'Breakdown' 2001
Michelangelo 'Pieta' ('The Pity') 1498-1499
Paul Bramley, curator
Sam Gilliam
Sarah Pager
William Dyce 'Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858' 1858
Yves Klein
AUTHORS & BOOKS
Anna Souter 'Vegetate Project'
Anna Tsing 'The Mushroom at the end of the World' 2015
Charlotte Higgins on Michael Landy, 'The Guardian' 27 Jan 2021
Clive King 'Stig of the Dump' 1963
Donna Haraway
Frances Hodgson Burnett 'The Secret Garden' 1911
Jane Bennett 'Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology of Things' 2009
Merlin Sheldrake 'Entangled Life : How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures' 2020
Norman Bryson 'Looking at the Overlooked' 1990
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Steven Connor 'The Book of Skin' 2004
Sue Stuart-Smith 'The Well Gardened Mind' 2020
T S Eliot 'Burnt Norton' 1935
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Piketty 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' 2013
Tim Dee 'Landfill' 2018
Timothy Morton 'Being Ecological' 2018
Tracy Chevalier 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' 1999
GALLERIES
163 Gallery, London, juliebentley.co.uk
South London Gallery
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
White Conduit Projects, London
FILM & TELEVISION & RADIO
'Girl with a Pearl Earring' 2003, director Peter Webber
'Princess Mononoke' 2001, director Hayao Miyazaki
'The Archers' 1950-ongoing BBC Radio 4
PLACES
Belarus
Chew Valley Lake, Somerset UK
Harris, Outer Hebrides Scotland UK
Latvia
Lithuania
Maeshowe, Orkney Scotland UK
Pegwell Bay, UK
Ring of Brodgar, Orkney Scotland UK
St Kilda, archipelago off Scotland UK
OTHER
A P Fitzpatrick Fine Art Materials
Artangel
Mark Rothko Memorial Fund
Maye E Bruce, inventor of 'Quick Return' compost system 1935
Slade School of Fine Art
Wimbledon School of Art
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 to marry Kitty. Kitty wants to leave Mark. Tristram, the junior solicitor, is just utterly confused about what's happening and where and by whom, and if all those strange noises are thanks to a resident ghost.
Milly and I go on to discuss her solo exhibitions, most recently at Vitrine Gallery in Basel, her upcoming residency at British School at Rome and all the work inbetween. Mentions go to foley sound production, the physicality of the stage, playing with dimensions, scale, collage, flattening, inflating, puppeteers, backstage antics, confusing performance with reality, implicating the audience, dark elements shrouded in comedy, hands in gloves, hand in black and hands holding celery.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
MILLY PECK
millypeck.com
instagram millypeck
'A Matter of Routine' Vitrine Gallery Basel solo exhibition
'Loud Knock' Matts Gallery solo exhibition
'Pressure Head' Assembly Point solo exhibition
Works mentioned: 'Alight', 'Moquette', 'The Unforgiving Hour', 'Straphangers'
ARTISTS
Amelia Barrett (performer at Milly's solo exhibition at Assembly Point)
Andrea Montagne
Art Green
Edward Hopper
Emma Cousin ('Chats in Lockdown' podcast host)
Jordan Baseman (Royal College tutor and Art Fictions Episode 10)
Konrad Klapheck
Nick Mauss
Steve McQueen ('Deadpan' 1997)
William Hogarth ('A Rake's Progress' 1732-1734)
ACTORS & DIRECTORS
Bong Joon-ho (South Korean director, screenwriter, producer)
Buster Keaton (silent movies)
Charlie Kaufman (American screenwriter, producer, director, novelist)
David Thewlis
Imelda Staunton
Mark Ruffalo
Robin Herford (British Theatre Director)
Sir Matthew Bourne OBE (choreographer)
Toby Jones
GALLERIES & THEATRES
Assembly Point, London
Goldsmiths CCA, London ('Solos' 2020, 'How! Chicago Imagists' 2019)
Kunsthalle, Basel Switzerland
Little Angel Theatre, Islington London
Matt's Gallery, London
National Theatre Archives
Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford UK
Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough UK
Vitrine Gallery, London and Basel Switzerland
PLAYS
'A Chorus of Disapproval'
'Fantastic Mr Fox'
'House and Garden' (Alan Ayckbourn dyptich)
'Mr What Not' (Alan Ayckbourn, where the central character does not speak and, otherwise, there is speech and sound)
'Noises Off'
'Relatively Speaking' (Alan Ayckbourn)
'The Red Shoes'
BOOKS & MAGAZINES
'American Zoo: A Sociological Safari' 2015 David Grazien
'Frieze' magazine (review by Kito Nedo 2 Dec 2020)
'Feel Free' 2018 Zadie Smith
FILMS
'Anomalisa' 2015
'Berbarian Sound Studio' 2012 (also performed at Donmar Warehouse)
'Birdman: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance' 2014
'Dark Waters' 2019
'Snowpiercer' 2013 (based on French graphic novel 'Le Transperceneige' by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette)
'Steamboat Bill Junior' 1928
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
Jane Wilson
Laura Owens
Louise Wilson
Pilar Corrias
'Studio International' magazine
Thames & Hudson
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 mark in the world of one's existence. Likewise, 'The Origin of the Birds' focuses on the start of beginnings. In this story, Qfwfa narrates his (his?) adventures into the void to discover and embrace the evolutionary rejects as part of his ancestry and presence, particularly their leader Queen Or with whom he is besotted.
'A Sign in Space' appeared in 'Cosmicomics' in 1965 while 'The Origin of the Birds' was first published in ‘t zero’ 1967. Both stories feature in ‘The Complete Cosmicomics’ comprising 'Cosmicomics' and 't zero' plus other stories published 2009.
CECILIA CHARLTON
ceciliacharlton.com
instagram ceciliacharlton
BOOKS IDEAS WRITERS
'A Room of One's Own' 1929, Virginia Woolf
'Against Interpretation' 1966, Susan Sontag
'Agnes Martin' 2015, Tate
'Brave New World' 1932, Aldous Huxley
Jane Austen
'No One Belongs Here More Than You' 2007 Miranda July
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 'Eyes of a Blue Dog' 1947, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' 1967, 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World' 1968 co-author Hernan Diaz
'The World of Ornament' 2006, Auguste Racinet and M Dupont-Auberville
The concept of multiple discovery
'The Sixteen Trees of the Somme' 2014 Lars Mytting
Three Fates from Greek mythology
William Beebe, American naturalist, ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, explorer, and author
William Weaver, Italo Calvino's translator
'Women's Work: A Personal Reckoning with Labour, Motherhood and Privilege' 2019, Megan K Stack
ARTISTS CURATORS GALLERIES
Alison Jacques Gallery London, 'The Gees Bend Quiltmakers' in partnership with the Souls Grow Deep Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the contributions of African American artists from the Southern states, 20 Dec 2020 - 6 Feb 2021
Anni Albers
Agnes Martin 'Words' 1961
Dolly Parton
Hannah Brown 'Art Fictions' Episode 17, 9 Dec 2020
Helen Frankenthaler
Hilma Af Klimt
Lee Krasner
London Art Fair, 'Platform' focus on folk art londonartfair.co.uk/fair-programme/platform, 20-31 Jan 2021
Nicolaus Schafhausen, 'Der Speigel' 2013, resigned as Director of Kunsthalle Wein 2019
Robert Rauschenberg 'Erased de Kooning Drawing' 1963
Sheila Hicks
Turner Contemporary Margate, 'We Will Walk: Art and Resistance in the American South' curated by Hannah Collins and Paul Goodwin, 7 Feb - 6 Sep 2020
Willem de Kooning
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 excerpts from her selected poem. In our discussion she relays the importance of fiction, giving up television, sudden changes brought about by lockdown, connections between a time of world wars and the global pandemic, the range of experiences for those of us untouched by illness, missing friends, the blow up of Black Lives Matter and the sense of powerlessness when it comes to the changes needed for the wellbeing of our planet. She describes her art practice, detailing the witnessing of changes in the landscape from the west country to East London, what makes a site compelling for a landscape painter, how the presence of human life is portrayed without figures, the sublime tinged with fear, staying true to one’s own temperament and passion, being genuine and authentic, attempts to domesticate nature and how she cried when Victoria Park was closed to the public.
Together we wonder is love eternal or only time? Is it sudden endings which punctuate time, leading to its reassertion as a pivotal marker in our lives? Can we rely on nature itself to continue or is this also a thing of the past? When we look about, how much do we really see that is present and how much is imposed from our childhood past? Is the end of young love depressing or is it a relief to grow up and worry about a pension? Will worry take over our conscious life as it slips away? Is having less time a better condition for decisiveness? For taking risks in the studio? Is seeing less exhibitions better for looking more thoroughly?
FEMALE BRITISH WRITERS around the time of THE AUDEN GROUP and The Great War!
Alice Meynell 1847-1922
Cicily Isabel Fairfield 1892-1983
Jessie Pope 1868-1941
Millicent Garrett Fawcett 1847-1929
Margaret Sackville 1881-1963
Margaret Postaget Cole 1893-1980
May Wedderburn Cannan 1893-1973
Rose MaCaulay 1881-1958
Vera Brittain 1893-1970
BOOKS
‘A God in Ruins’ 2015 by Kate Atkinson
‘After the End’ 2019 by Clare MacIntosh
‘Girl, Woman, Other’ 2019 by Bernardine Evaristo
‘My Dark Vanessa’ by Kate Elizabeth Russell 2020
‘Nobody Told Me: poetry and Parenthood’ 2016 by Hollie McNish
‘Patrick Melrose’ 2016 by Edward St Aubyn
‘Take Nothing with You’ 2018 and ‘Notes From an Exhibition’ 2007 by Patrick Gale
‘Queenie’ 2019 by Candice Carty-Williams
Robert Goddard
ARTISTS & GALLERIES & DESIGNERS
‘Ambit’ magazine
Ansel Adams
Ellen Altfest
‘Forest, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection’, 2011, The National Gallery
George Shaw
Graeme Sutherland
Guy Oliver
Jerwood FVU Awards
John Constable
John Everett Millais, Ophelia’ 1852
John William Waterhouse, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ 1888
Liberty
Paul Nash
Reman Sadani, ‘Walkout 1’ 2020
Samuel Palmer
The John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, 12 Feb – 27 June 2021
Union Gallery
White Cube, ‘In the Studio’
William Morris
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 across a mere 20 minutes as Howie recalls a series of domestic specifics, largely around his wife Patty, as he nurses their baby Bug.
DANIEL STURGIS
danielsturgis.co.uk
BOOKS, WRITERS, SCREEN
'A Mark on the Wall' 1917 Virginia Woolf
'Fly' 2010 Season 3, Episode 10 from 'Breaking Bad'
'City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara' 1993 by Brad Gooch
'The Diary of a Nobody' 1892 George and Weedon Grossmith
'Great Expectations' 1860 by Charles Dickens
John Updike
'Mr Bean' series 1990 starring Rowan Atkinson
'No Lab: A Novel' 2019 by Richard Roth
'The Journal of a Disappointed Man' 1919 by W. N. P. Barbellion
Paul Auster
ARTISTS, DESIGNERS, CRITICS
Barney Bubbles
Benjamin Buchloh
Dan Walsh
Emma Hart
Francesco Borromini
Gerhard Richter
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Frances Richardson
Jeremy Moon
Le Corbusier
Leonardo da Vinci
Michael Bracewell
Patrick Caulfield
Peter Kinley
Pontormo
Prunella Clough
Shila Khatami
Sonia Delaunay
GALLERIES
Chelsea Space, London
Luca Tommasi, Milan
Martina Geccelli
PS Project Space, Amsterdam
Raumx, London
Rocket Gallery, London
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 seaside. He becomes obsessed with observation and collecting, giving up his political aspirations for a more materially intimate life - what an excellent idea for many of that lot !
FRANCES RICHARDSON
francesrichardson.co.uk
karstenschubert.com
ARTISTS
Alicja Kwade
Alison Wilding
Brancusi
Charlotte Posenenski
Jane Hayes Greenwood
Peter Dreher
Robert Morris
BOOKS
'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' 2009 and 'Flights' 2007 by Olga Tokarczuk
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 Jackson
Olivia Bax
Roland Barthes 'A Lovers Discourse' 1977
Rosalind Krauss
Stanley Spence
ART GALLERIES
Block 336
City and Guilds of London Art School
Goldsmiths CCA
Grand Union
Peter von Kant Gallery
Saatchi Gallery
Tate Modern
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 might be like to be in someone else's mind, hybridity, blue-blackness, meaning through action, transcending racial delineation, transracial, breeding programme elitism, shapeshifting gender and race, jealousy of the next generation.
20:00-45:00 Grace's art practice, retro futurism, the current dystopian edge, pills for sex, pushing the limits of what it is to be human, NASA spaceship design, how sliding doors came about, shaping of sculptures around the body, memories in objects wrt Japanese Shinto, hidden materials, potential medicinal elements, gut as the original brain, the fate of the sea urchin brain, multiples, subconscious, conversation pits, the gut as a surveillance system for the body
45:00-55:00 other stuff about Grace, from her influences to the books she's reading now!
GRACE WOODCOCK
gracewoodcock.com
castor.gallery
BOOKS
Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' by 1932
Jonathan Crary '24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep' 2013
Mark Fisher 'Capitalist Realism' 2009
Octavia E Butler 'The Patternist Series' 1976-1980, 'The Parable Series' 1993-1998, 'Bloodchild & Other Stories' 1995
Phillip K Dick 'The Man in the High Castle' 1962
Svetlanda Boym 'The Future of Nostalgia' 2001
Tibor Fischer 'The Collector Collector' 1997
FILMS & SERIES
'Barbarella' 1968
'Forbidden Planet' 1956
'Gattaca' 1997
'Star Treck' 1966-1969
'The Devil Girl from Mars' 1954
'The Jetsons' 1962-63
'The Man in the High Castle' 2015-2019
'The Truman Show' 1998
ARTISTS & THINKERS
Alison Wilding
Anicka Yi
Diane Simpson
Ernesto Neto
Glenn Ligon
Hannah Levy
Ittah Yoda
Keith Piper - BLK Art Group
Pakui Hardware
Paloma Proudfoot
Rafal Zajko
Saelia Aparicio
Wilhelm Reich - Orgone Theory
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 - and her approach to working across drawing, painting, curating and podcasting, encompass her whole studio practice.
0:00-0:30 Summary of 'Nausea', fluid consciousness, isolation, observation, madness, body, dangling arms, a mouth as thin of a dead snake, spreading cheeks, vomit, nausea, seat as a dead donkey, natural states, the shortcomings of the autodidact, humanism, experiences, projectile vomiting, experimentation in colour, shift, change, the future, elitism, Rembrandt
0:30-1:10 Emma's art practice - contemporary dance, verbing reaching, showing an idea, actively working something out, bodily boundaries, breasts, skin, grounding of figures, 'New Dirt', colour, background as a surround, 'Wash your Hands' for Ambit magazine, wall drawing, social classes, 2D & 3D composition, drawing, drawing, drawing, 'Trigonometry', 'Flower Moon' animation for exhibition, failing meditation, the physical highs and memories thru gardening
1:10-1:20 other Emma stuff - Morandi, folk music, 'Bread and Jam', 'Chats in Lockdown' podcast, activism, what Emma's reading now!
EMMA COUSIN
emmacousin.info
BOOKS & WRITERS & THINKERS (get ready for a long list!)
Albert Camus 'The Myth of Sisyphus' 1942
Anne Carson
Derek Jarman 'Modern Nature : Journals 1989-1990' 2018
Eula Biss 'On Immunity : An Inoculation' 2014
Elias Canetti 'Earwitness : Fifty Characters' 1974 & 'Crowds and Power' 1960
Edwin A Abbott 'Flatland : A Romance of Many Dimensions' 1884
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gregory Bateson 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' 1972
Honoré de Balzac
JG Ballard 'High Rise' 1975
Joanna Pocock 'Surrender : The Call of the American West' 2019
John Berger 'A Painter of our Time' 1958
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 'The Phenomenology of Perception' 1945
René Descartes
Richard Power 'The Overstory' 2018
Samuel Beckett
Sergei Eisenstein 'On Disney' 1986
Simone de Beauvoir
Thomas Mann 'Death in Venice' 1912
William Petter Blatty 'The Exorcist' 1971
OTHER ARTISTS
Amy Sillman
Andrea V Wright
Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom
Georgio Morandi
Hardeep Pandhal
John Cage, composer, artist, music theorist
Lindsey Mendick
Mark Morris, dancer and choreographer
Michael Tippett, composer
Paul Carey-Kent, art critic, curator
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
William Blake
PODCAST
'Chats in Lockdown' hosted by Emma Cousin
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 creativity and for a way of being that doesn’t fall subject to a cold logic. She describes the the book as a testament to creativity as a type of freedom, of intellectual freedom, of social freedom. It's also a timely selection as we emerge from lockdown which has been, amongst other things, a challenging time of coping with isolation.
0:00 - 0:22 the book, post natal depression, social repression, marriage, isolation, feminism, inspiration, pattern, gothic horror, human rights, social reform, independence
0:22 - 0:28 project for Hospital Rooms at Bluebird House, a mental health unit in Southampton
0:28 - 0:30 the decorative, design, contrasting unplanned
0:30 - 0:37 Charley's process, creating a ground, building up a painting, blending, tone, 'sb|2m2h (smiling back, too much to handle)' 2020, 'eod/\qtpi (end of discussion, cutie pie)' 2020
0:37 - 0:43 collaboration with Tobias Revell and Wesley Goatley at 'Emergence', London College of Communication as part of London Design Festival 2019, 'charismatic megapigment' 2019, webcam, abstraction, symbol, machine intelligence
0:43 - 0:55 Charley's wider practice, colour, intuition, shape, abstract painting, finishing the painting, physical reaction, phd, drawing, unlearning, boredom
0:55 - 1:03 Charley's writing and influences, Agnes Martin, sensitivity, emptying out, minimalism, Instantloveland, Lee Krasner, female trailblazers, resilience, creative spirit, energy, robots, Judas Priest, cartoons, growing up in Birmingham, staying indoors, painting leather jackets
1:03 - 1:08 Upcoming exhibitions, virtual exhibitions, skateboard auction and what Charley's reading RIGHT NOW!
CHARLEY PETERS
charleypeters.com
BOOKS & WRITERS
‘Women and Economics’ 1898 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
‘The Home, it’s Work and Influence’ 1903 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
‘What Diantha Did’ 1909 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
‘Herland’ 1915 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe
‘A Room of One’s Own’ 1929 by Virginia Wolf
‘Do You Compute’ 2019 by Ryan Mungia and Steven Heller
COMMISSIONS
Bluebird House for Hospital Rooms
Centrepoint for House of Vans
ARTISTS
Eva Hesse 1936-1970
Agnes Martin 1912-2004
Lee Krasner ‘Living Colour’ exhibition
Clare Price, Alison Goodyear, EC as collaborators for Instantloveland article
GALLERIES
The Barbican
405 Gallery
Hauser & Wirth
Frog tape !!!
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 drowning in guilt. Jordan is very much taken by the book’s single focussed account of the two men as we contrast the multitude of aspects found in any one person, which he depicts as simply as possible in his short films. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaption of the book into film makes for further pondering about social status and the American post war context.
0:00 - 0:28 the book, the film, post war America, context, no happy endings, celebrity, image, good and evil, Trump, complexity of the self, psychoanalysis, expectations of wealth and material goods
0:28 - 0:55 Jordan's films, portraiture, self portraiture, construction, artifice, film production techniques, interplay of visuals and audio
0:55 - 1:06 influences, artists, books, where to see Jordan's work
JORDAN BASEMAN
Jordanbaseman.co.uk
mattsgallery.org
‘Blackout’
‘Gendersick’
‘Veil’
‘The Sun Always Shines on the Righteous’
‘The Dandy Doctrine’
‘The Last Walk’
BOOKS & WRITERS
‘Difficult Women’ 2017 by Roxane Gay
‘Critical Path’ 1981 by Buckminster Fuller
Czenzi Ormonde, author and screenwriter
Phyllis Nagy, screenwriter
Raymond Chandler, author and screenwriter
Roxane Gay, author, professor, editor, social commentator
Stephen King
Jonathan Franzen
SCREEN
‘Strangers on a Train’ 1951 directed by Alfred Hitchcock
‘The Wizard of Oz’ 1939 directed by Victor Fleming
‘The Hitch Hiker’ 1953 directed by Ida Lupino
‘Match Point’ 2005 directed by Woody Allen
‘The Midnight Gospel’ 2020 animation series on Netflix
ARTISTS
Robert Mapplethorpe 1946-1989
Jennifer West – film, installation, performance, zines
‘Christ’s Entry into Journalism’ by Kara Walker at MoMA
MUSIC
‘Extreme Love’ by Holly Hendron
‘Horses’ by Patti Smith
Michael Stipe
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 a painting might be put together. Together, we make some unexpected connections such as the way human presence brings about colour changes on cave walls, like a peculiar form of cave painting. And how Socrates might align with Seawater and the practice of an artist. Alice's use of symbols present a rich dossier of playfulness, for our eyes and our imaginations to wander around the canvas and compose our own personal stories. (Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality, however, this episode is the only exception, being recorded before lockdown.)
ALICE BROWNE
alicebrowne.com
@alicerbrowne (instagram)
'DPM' 2019
'Mighty-Connect-Discovery (Spaghetti Factory)' 2018
'After The Last Word/ Vindolanda' 2018
BOOKS
'Earthsea' by Ursula K Le Guin
'New Dark Age : Technology and the End of the Future' by James Bridle
'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
GALLERIES / EXHIBITIONS
flatlandgallery.com (solo exhibition 'Camouflage')
tintypegallery.com (solo exhibition 'Found')
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 in a non-commercial art practice, his unique approach has also given rise to charitable initiatives including Painting Pro Bono and Painting Per Diem. (Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
TOM WILMOTT
-
tomwilmott.co.uk
-
instagram tomrtwilmott
BOOKS
-
'Tell Them I Said No' by Martin Herbert
-
'On Being an Artist' by Michael Craig-Martin
-
'On Truth' by George Orwell
ARTISTS / GALLERIES
-
Agnes Martin 1912-2004
-
After Nyne Gallery
-
Bedwyr Williams (featured on 'Chats in Lockdown' with Emma Cousin podcast Episode 11 May 2020)
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Douglas Gordon b.1966 (represented by Gagosian Gallery, '24 Hour Psycho' 1993, 'What Have I Done' solo exhibition at Hayward Gallery, Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) 1997 featured double sided film showing 'The Exorcist', 1973 directed by William Friedkin and 'The Song of Bernadette', 1943 directed by Henry King)
-
Ed Harris (directed and starred in 'Pollock' 2002)
-
Robert Motherwell 1915-1991
-
Helen Frankenthaler 1928-2011
-
Robert Ryman 1930-2019
-
Rosalind Davis (featured on 'Art Fictions' podcast Episode 2)
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. We discuss her art as creating a voice for lost industries and the memory embedded in spaces as well as her exhibitions with Thorpe Stavri, The Koppel Project and Dateagle. (Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
ANDREA V WRIGHT
andreavwright.com
instagram andreavwright
BOOKS
-
'A Little History of Philosophy' by Nigel Warburton
-
Carlos Castaneda
-
‘Narcissis and Goldmunn’ by Herman Hess
-
‘Notes on the Index’ by Rosalind Krauss
-
‘On the Road’ by Jack Karoac
-
‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’ by Georges Perec
-
‘The Eyes of the Skin’ by Juhani Pallasmaa
GALLERIES/CURATORS
-
Alexander Stavrou (‘Substance Bundle’ at The Koppel Project)
-
Dateagle (‘Prevent this Tragedy’)
-
David Cass (‘Surface’ at Projection Room)
-
PLOP Residency (Oli Epp)
-
Thorpe Stavri (‘Index’ at World Unit Whitechapel)
ARTISTS
- Matthew Burrows (Artist Support Pledge 2020), Jordan Baseman (‘Radio Influenza’ 2019 with The Wellcome Collection), Professor Maria Lalic (Bath School of Art & Design), Donald Judd (1928-1994)
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 Iceland and we discuss in detail, her paintings and installations including those seen at Glass Cloud, Lily Brooke and Arthouse1. (Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
Notes and Links:
HANNAH LUXTON
-
hannahluxton.com
-
instagram hannahluxton_
-
BOOKS / TEXT / WRITERS
-
‘Of Stars and Chasms’ exhibition catalogue text by Sara Jaspan
-
‘The Faraway Nearby’ by Rebecca Solnit
-
‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann
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Albert Camus (Nobel Prize winning French philosopher, author, journalist who attended Yves Klein exhibition ‘The Void’ 1958)
-
Slavoj Zizek (Slovenian philosopher who introduced the concept of unknown knowns)
GALLERIES
-
Arthouse1
-
Barbican Arts Group Trust
-
Glass Cloud Gallery
-
Lily Brooke Gallery
-
The Hayward Gallery
ARTISTS
- Julie F Hill juliehill.co.uk, Grant Foster grantfoster.com, Yves Klein 1928-1962, Mark Rothko 1903-1970, Ansel Adams 1902-1984, John Martin 1789-1854, J M W Turner 1775-1851, Caspar David Friedrich 1774-1840, Raphael 1483-1520, Joachim Patinir 1480-1524, Hans Memling 1430-1494
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 City. (Mixed Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
Notes and Links:
SIMON LININGTON
simonlinington.com
instagram simonlinington
BOOKS / TEXT
-
‘Evangeline Too’ 2019 sundaysalon.com/2020/01/evangeline-too
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‘Ghosts’ 2020 soanywaymagazine.org
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‘Palinure de Mexico’ by Fernando del Paso
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‘Shoplifting’ from American Apparel by Tao Lin
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‘Tristessa’ by Jack Kerouac
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‘Under the Volcano’ by Malcolm Lowry
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‘Not I’ by Samuel Barclay Beckett, performed by Billie Whitelaw
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‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Barclay Beckett
GALLERIES/CURATORIAL
-
Brooke Benington (residency, Mexico City)
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Castor Projects (‘In from the Light’)
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Dateagle (‘Not to be Trusted’, ‘Prevent this Tragedy’)
-
Division of Labour (‘Everything can be Broken’)
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Hayward Gallery (‘Out of the Dark Concrete’)
-
Lily Brooke (‘Everything is Medicine’)
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Tate Gallery (‘From the Freud Museum’ 1991-1996 Susan Hiller)
-
William Benington (‘La La Land’)
MUSIC
-
song ‘Evangeline’ by Angels of Light
-
song ‘Volcano’ by Beck
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 and Links:
GRANT FOSTER
-
grantfoster.org (website)
-
foster_grant (instagram)
-
tintypegallery.com/artists/grant-foster (gallery)
BOOKS / TEXT
-
'Ambit' magazine
-
'The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made us so Smart' by Daniel Lieberman
-
'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde
-
'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-
'Apollo' magazine, article by Simon Grant
-
'Thoughts on Doom' by Eleanor Hartney of AICA (aicainternational.com)
-
'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoevsky
-
'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson
GALLERIES
-
Lychee One ('I'm not being Funny' solo exhibition, 2019)
-
Transition Gallery ('A Stone in the Mountain' with Georgia Hayes, 2018)
-
Tintype Gallery ('Ground Figure Sky' solo exhibition, 2017)
PODCASTS
-
'Weird Studies' with Phil Ford and J F Martel
-
'Extinction Rebellion and the End of the World' hosted by Rana Mitter on 'BBC Arts & Ideas'
ARTISTS
- Georgia Hayes b. 1946, Sigmar Polke 1941-2010, Andy Warhol 1928-1987, Max Ernst 1891-1976, Marcelle Duchamp 1887-1968, Francis Picabia 1879-1953, George Grosz 1893-1959, J W Turner 1775-1851, Albrecht Dürer 1471-1528
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 Tapes is an introductory series recorded in lockdown with variations in audio quality.)
Notes and Links:
GRANT FOSTER
-
grantfoster.org (website)
-
foster_grant (instagram)
-
tintypegallery.com/artists/grant-foster (gallery)
BOOKS / TEXT
-
'Ambit' magazine
-
'The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made us so Smart' by Daniel Lieberman
-
'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde
-
'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-
'Apollo' magazine, article by Simon Grant
-
'Thoughts on Doom' by Eleanor Hartney of AICA (aicainternational.com)
-
'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoevsky
-
'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson
GALLERIES
-
Lychee One ('I'm not being Funny' solo exhibition, 2019)
-
Transition Gallery ('A Stone in the Mountain' with Georgia Hayes, 2018)
-
Tintype Gallery ('Ground Figure Sky' solo exhibition, 2017)
PODCASTS
-
'Weird Studies' with Phil Ford and J F Martel
-
'Extinction Rebellion and the End of the World' hosted by Rana Mitter on 'BBC Arts & Ideas'
ARTISTS
- Georgia Hayes b. 1946, Sigmar Polke 1941-2010, Andy Warhol 1928-1987, Max Ernst 1891-1976, Marcelle Duchamp 1887-1968, Francis Picabia 1879-1953, George Grosz 1893-1959, J W Turner 1775-1851, Albrecht Dürer 1471-1528
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
'Vanishing Points' 2019
'Haus Konstruktive' 2018
'Strangelands' 2017
'No one Lives in the Real World' 2015
'Echo Chamber' 2014
Artistic Collaborator : Justin Hibbs justinhibbs.com carolfletcher.com
BOOKS
'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel
'What They Didn't Teach You in Art School' by Rosalind Davis and Annabel Tilley
'Whatever Happened to Interracial Love' by Kathleen Collins
'Autumn' by Ali Smith
'Art Monthly' magazine
'Bringing Up the Bodies' by Hilary Mantel
'G.' by John Berger
'Tell Them I Said No' by Martin Herbert
GALLERIES
Koppel Project thekoppelproject.com
JGM Gallery jgmgallery.com
The Foundry Gallery thefoundrygallery.org
No Format Gallery secondfloor.co.uk
Collyer Bristow collyerbristow.com/gallery
Coffee is My Cup of Tea Instagram/richard_ducker
ARTISTS
Tomma Abts davidzwirner.com
Jordan Baseman jordanbaseman.co.uk rca.ac.uk/more/staff/jordan-baseman
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 written and performed by Griffin Knipe.
(Shout out to Matt at The Tennis Podcast and Steve at Animation Magazine for their recording tips!)