A Pile of Pages
Welcome!
A friend recently asked if it mattered to me whether readers know me first as a novelist or an arts writer, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. When I start writing a piece of text, I’m not sure what form it will take: the first words of a first sentence might take me to a short story, a meandering novel, a fragmented essay.
In 2013 I started compiling a body of research around art and writing and where they meet, and the ultimate form of that ever-growing pile of pages eludes me still. For a decade I’ve given them the title ‘A Penny Spinning’ because, much like a page of text, a penny at rest appears flat—barely two dimensional. And yet a penny, much like a page, reveals its endless dimensions once set in whirring motion.
Over the years, I’ve shared this material in lectures and workshops, but most of the essays (to employ a very loose definition of the term) felt too opaque, crude or raw to share with a wider audience. Now, I think whatever appeal they might have lies in this ‘rawness’, and that this approach is best suited to many of the artists and writers I’ve felt compelled to write about.
My hope is that these essays-not essays will resonate with others who feel drawn to the visceral Siluetas of Ana Mendieta or the spectral performance works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and be interested to learn about the obscure (sometimes very obscure) pieces of text in conversation with their work.
As such, I’ll be sharing my own written responses to these artists and also discussing the work of other authors much more eloquent and innovative than myself, as well as sharing writing prompts and further reading that have served me over the years.
I hope you enjoy them, and find the artists and authors herein as sustaining and galvanising as I have.
