ART FICTIONS – Details, episodes & analysis

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 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 2023 Art & Industry Triennial, Dunkerque France - June 2023 'Re/Sisters', Barbican London 5 Oct 2023 - 14 Jan 2024 LABoral 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.

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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