ART FICTIONS

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. ...

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...

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, trappe...

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 extensive...

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'...

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. W...

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', firs...

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...

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...

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...

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 the...

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 acknow...

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 rebell...

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...

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...

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 o...

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 p...

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 overse...

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 s...

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 jilli...

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 anxieti...

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...

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 staple...

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 drea...

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 Dodg...