ART FICTIONS

Guest artist MARCUS COATES

joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss his work via 'Welsh Incident' by Robert Graves. Published in 1929, this short poem is a retelling of an overhead conversation about "un-Welsh" creatures emerging from the sea.

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Marcus and Jillian's conversation encompasses longing, empathy, humour, grasping, death, wolves, psychosis, parenting, migration, birds, badgers, unknowability, ...

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 i...

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 dis...

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 en...

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, C...

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 tex...

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...

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...

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 d...

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 ...

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 . A...

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 a...

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 ...

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 sa...

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, crue...

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 paintin...

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 agenc...

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...

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 ...