Essays
If Only She Knew the Name of Her River
‘You have to ground first and find a space to come back to,’ says the psychologist I am seeing.
‘Where is safety for you?’
‘The river, back home.’
‘Good, now visualise it and where you are exactly; what do you feel and hear?’
‘In the river’
Alarmed Entanglements
Möchten Sie mit dem Bild schlafen?
Would you like to sleep with the painting?
I was in Munich, on a weekend getaway. And at a modern art museum which shall go shamed but unnamed, I had come dangerously close to a Cy Twombly painting.
Thirst makes me a modern woman
K is trying to convince me to come to Trumps tonight for a sticker party. We’re standing outside Drama Bar in the leathery midnight heat, passing a vape back and forth. I bought it today – 5,000 pulls for just €15! – and it’s giving me a contact high with a regulated nervous system. J and I have promised each other we’re going to quit, that we don’t need another vice. But considering the day I’ve had, I’m giving myself a break.
Dreaming of Chinese New Year
In the morning, The Moment’s bottle of wine is still on the kitchen counter. The liquid inside is more brown than red, slobbery and the label reads five pounds Clubcard Discount. By brown, I mean illogical, in that there’s a crest in the colour, the bits at the bottom deflecting the light, and then sloping upwards into the gradient of day-old tea. It suggests bubbles, or something else suitably full of nothing. I pick it up, and, after a brief inspection, I drink it.
Beating the Bounds of Stroud’s Heavens
Through high summer we beat the bounds of the Heavens, my little brother and I. Great sticks thwacking down nettles. In winter it was briars and brambles, in autumn mulched leaves, and in spring – mud. We walked the perimeters of fields, sticking to hedges and stopping at aluminium gates. As we grew bigger, we climbed the gates, pulling down on already sagging hinges. We’d prise apart barbed wire, tugging down temporary fences blocking footpaths. Keep Out signs read like invitations to us.
Fancy Work: Reading into the Silences and Learning That Not All Archives Are Forever
My Nana was a habidasher, my mother was a habidasher’s assistant, and my great aunt was the head seamstress on a shop floor. This is a phrase I have written into my work many times, thinking about how there is a lineage of skill, of thread and knowledge between my maternal family. I will admit now that until I read Alice Hattrick’s Fancy WorkI have been ignorant on how much thread and sewing skills hold a rich history: an archive like no other.
The Line that Falters
Last November, I visited the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) in Margate. The residency programme only accepts painters, and lasts 15 months. But as I walked around the studio spaces, I didn’t just see paintings, but dozens of leaves of paper: drawings, etchings and poems, pinned to the studio walls. One of the residents, Esme, told me that they are encouraged to create both a drawing and a poem at the beginning of each studio day. These can be throwaways: it’s not important to write well, instead it is an exercise in dual expression.
On Being Alone
Being alone, when it works, is a gorgeous paradox. What to me seemed singular, or individual, or individuating about aloneness has been wonderfully disturbed by the writing of Donald Woods Winnicott. In a paper originally given at the Extra Scientific Meeting for British Psychoanalysts in 1957, Winnicott explores what might be obvious to some: that we can only truly be alone in the presence of an other.