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ART FICTIONS is fortnightly programme, created by artist Jillian Knipe. Each guest artist selects a piece of fiction, which we both explore, then use as a lens through which to view their artwork. We delve into the book‘s themes, context and characters, which opens up and steers a rich conversation about the artist‘s practice. The podcast bounces back and forth between art and text, all the while focussing on the ideas which govern both. It is a way of talking alongside art, rather than directly at it, getting close and personal with the origins of artistic ideas. Follow @artfictionspodcast Instagram for images of works and links, and see the podcast notes for all the references mentioned. Support via patreon.com/ARTFICTIONSPODCAST.
Episodes
Thursday Nov 18, 2021
Thursday Nov 18, 2021
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. We follow a young boy, separated from his mother and brother, into a forbidden place of ghostly slavers, violators, friends and foe, as he navigates his way through a foreign land, coming to understand his sense of rightfulness and identity.
We go on to discuss Richard's formative years in Nigeria, a country whose name itself is stained with the nasty history of colonial subjugation. He speaks of his paternal lineage, steeped in story telling, from an area of the world, rich with artisans and stolen artworks. His world suddenly changes in his teens when he and his brother arrive in the UK to live with his mother. At this point, his own negotiation in a new land begins.
Our conversation expands on Richard studying drawing and textiles, and researching mythologies, semiotics, rituals, archetypes and visual systems. He describes the courses he's developed at The Royal Drawing School which attempt to inform students about the global lineages of and connections between imagery, representations and artistic practices across different cultures. His observations uncover the unexpected around petroglyphs, nazca lines and stone tablets of the ancient past to glass tablet phones and emojis of the high tech present.
RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE
instagram pandagwad
EXHIBITIONS
February 2022 - Galerie Bernhard in Zürich
WORKS
'Awon Osere' 2020 watercolour and ink on paper
'Contemplating with Effigies' 2020 oil on wood
PODCAST
The Compendium Podcast with Dexter Orszagh
BOOKS & WRITERS & SCREEN
Alejandro Jodorowsky & Juan Giménez 'The Metabarons' or 'The Saga of the Metabarons'
Alex Grey 'The Mission of Art'
Amos Tutuola 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'
Amos Tutuola 'The Palm Wine Drinkard'
Carl Jung 'Man & His Symbols'
Erich Neumann 'The Origins and History of Consciousness'
Joseph Campbell 'Hero with a Thousand Faces'
'Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myths' Netflix
Simon Blackburn, philosopher
'Spirited Away'
'Tales by Moonlight' Nigerian Television Authority
ARTISTS
El Greco
Giacometti
Giotto
Picasso
William Blake
COUNTRIES & CULTURES & HISTORIES
Ancient Greece
Benin Empire 1440 - 1897
Benin Expedition : Or the Benin Punitive Expedition in February 1897. Invasion of the Kingdom of Benin by the British Empire. After which Benin was absorbed into colonial Nigeria. Approx 2,500 religious artefacts, mnemonics and artworks were taken by Britain, including the Benin Bronzes, then around 40% were given to the British Museum.
Benin Bronzes : A collection of metal plaques and sculptures created by the Edo people from the 13th century onwards, which once decorated the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin. Over 1,000 items were taken by the British as part of the Benin Punitive Expedition.
Biafra War 1967 - 1970 : Civil war between Nigerian government and the Republic of Biafra.
Brazil
Christianity
Cuba
Egypt
Ghana
Ifá gods
Igbo people
Mesoamerica
Nigeria
Sabongida-Ora, Edo state
Yoruba
ARTS ORGANISATIONS
British Museum
Central Saint Martins
National Gallery
The Royal Drawing School
Zabludowicz Collection
Wednesday Oct 20, 2021
Wednesday Oct 20, 2021
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', first published in 1910. We follow Brigge into the depths of the down and out cityscape as he contemplates his fellow street people, acknowledging his urgency to write while being ill-equipped to do so.
We go on to discuss the constant country hopping of her childhood. Back then, architectural details became more reliable than the passing parade of friends, schools, neighbourhoods and languages. So she now mines these ideas for her studio practice where architectural details are re-purposed and renewed, creating unexpected sculptural forms, drifting back, forth and around in meaning and time.
Our conversation taps into overlapping past and future, finding modes to retrieve, drifting in and out of focus, slipping through time, panic spasms, hypersensitivity, and reality, experience and stories overlapping to become an indiscriminate montage.
EXHIBITIONS
2022 '(Everything) is Not What it Seems' NITJA Museum, Oslo
25 Nov 2021 - 7 Jan 2022 'b bl b' Garage off-site project, Moscow
10 Nov 2021 - 30 Jan 2022 'Not Painting' Copperfield, London
22 Oct 2021 - Dec 2022 'Silt' Brighton CCA
11 Sep 2021 - 20 Nov 2021 'One of Many Fragments : Edward Allington and Nika Neelova' New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury
NIKA NEELOVA
nikaneelova.com
instagram nikaneelova
ARTISTS
Ana Mendieta
Andrei Tarkovsky (film director)
Barbara Hepworth
Emma Cousin
Eva Hesse
Eva Rothschild
Fra Angelico
Holly Hendry
Jane Hayes Greenwood
Louise Bourgeois
Phyllida Barlow
Rachel Whiteread
Piero della Francesco
BOOKS & WRITERS
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 'The Mushroom at the End of the World'
Annie Ernaux 'The Years'
Donna Haraway 'Staying with the Trouble'
Edmund de Waal 'The Hare with the Amber Eyes'
Henrik Ibsen (playwright)
Maggie Nelson 'The Argonauts'
Manuel DeLanda 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History'
Margaret Atwood 'The Testaments'
Martin Heidegger 'The Basic Problems of Phenomenology'
Max Frisch 'Man in the Holocene'
Jean Paul Sartre 'Nausea'
Ocean Vuong 'On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful'
Rainer Maria Rilke 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'
Susan Sontag 'The Volcano Lover'
Tibor Fischer 'The Collector Collector'
Tom McCarthy 'Remainder'
Tom McCarthy 'Satin Island'
Virginia Woolf 'The Waves'
Saturday Oct 16, 2021
Saturday Oct 16, 2021
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 in the usual way - through the prism of their selected piece of fiction - though, for CULTURE EXCHANGE, there'll be a particular tilt towards cultural identity : the boundaries, hurdles, opportunities and possibilities which both curb and open up the artist's practice, as a result of their sense of culture being upended or especially challenged in a way that is unique to each life story.
instagram artfictions2020, jillaroo2020, fullerton_eliz
Thursday Sep 30, 2021
Thursday Sep 30, 2021
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, she is also compelled to open up the surface of objects to discover what's inside. How things work. And when that cannot be done physically, it is explored as an idea.
Elizabeth and Holly discuss her major recent, current and upcoming exhibitions:
Jan 2022 solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
29 May - 12 Nov 2021 'Invertebrate' De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
May 2021 - Mar 2023 group exhibition 'Breaking The Mould, Sculpture by Women since 1945 An Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition, for venues refer to artscouncilcollection.org.uk/exhibition/breaking-mould-sculpture-women-1945
Oct - Mar 2022 group exhibition 'Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules' Somerset House, London
19 May - 30 Aug 2021 'Indifferent Deep' De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Sep 2019 - Apr 2020 'The Dump Is Full of Images' Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
HOLLY HENDRY
hollyhendry.com
instagram h.ollyh.endry
stephenfriedmangallery.com
ARTISTS & DESIGNERS
Andy Holden
Astrida Neimanis
Helen Turner, E-Werk Luckenwalde, Berlin
Isamu Noguchi
Le Corbusier
Louise Bourgeois
Rebecca Horn
BOOKS & AUTHORS
Albert Camus 'The Stranger'
Beatriz Colomina 'X Rays in Architecture'
Eric Carle 'The Very Hungry Catepillar'
J G Ballard 'The Drowned World'
Maggie Nelson
Miles Orvell 'The Real Thing'
Rebecca Tamas 'Strangers : Essays on the Human and Nonhuman'
Tom McCarthy 'C'
GALLERIES & ASSOCIATES
De La Warr Pavilion
Liverpool Bienniel
Professor Parick Goswami, University of Huddersfield
Royal College of Art
Selfridges
Somerset House
Stephen Friedman Gallery
The Baltic
The International Necronautical Society
Whitehall Fabrications
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
FILMS & PERFORMERS
Buster Keaton
Pauline Oliveros
Robert De Niro
'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'
Monday Sep 13, 2021
Monday Sep 13, 2021
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 subtlety, reflection and the elusiveness of the object of which, I'm quite certain, Tanazaki would approve.
FIONA GRADY
fionagrady.co.uk
instagram fiona_grady
'Close to Home: The Everyday Sublime' JGM Gallery til 25 Sep 2021
'Kaleidoscope Prisms' Canary Wharf til end October 2021
'The Factory Project' October 2021
upcoming at The Foundry Gallery 2022
ARTISTS & CURATORS
Alfred Hitchcock
Anna Lytridou
Anne Veronica Janssens
Beatriz Milhazes
Ben McDonnell
Bridget Riley
Charley Peters
Daniel Buren
David Batchelor
Eric Thorpe
Félix González-Torres
Fumio Asakura
Gordon Matta-Clark
Hannah Luxton
James Turrell
Jane Hayes Greenwood
Julie F Hill
Linda Hemmersbach
Nick Stavri
Poppy Whatmore
Sol leWitt
Tim Ralston
Vivienne Maier
Yukako Shibata
BOOKS
Haruki Murakami 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' 1985
Leonard Koren 'Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers' 1984
Maggie Nelson 'The Argonauts' 2015
GALLERIES & ART ORGANISATIONS
Artist's Support Pledge
Asakura Museum of Sculpture
Bauhaus
Derix Glasstudios, Germany
JGM Gallery, London
Kevin Gauld Architecture
Leeds Arts University
Nightingale Arts
'Passengers' Residency, The Brunswick Centre
Projekt
Recreational Grounds
Sid Motion Gallery
The Art Station, Suffolk
The Foundry Gallery
White Conduit Projects, London
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
Thursday Jul 29, 2021
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 then open up the artist's practice as collages, cuts and slide-throughs of shadowy forms and real edges. They track how shapes are formed from in-between spaces around objects and the body, how multiple processes distance the form from its source, the invention of visual language and the importance of fragmentations which create a sense of the whole.
ARTISTS
Tuesday Jul 06, 2021
Tuesday Jul 06, 2021
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 acknowledge the ability of psychotherapy to excavate knowledge you didn't previous have about yourself, the selective access to language, the aggression within public rhetoric and language as spells.
LUKE BURTON
lukeburton.tumblr.com
bosseandbaum.com/artists/luke-burton
instagram luke_p_burton
'Impossible Weather' solo exhibition 2020 Bosse and Baum
'The Artist Oracle' Sep 2021 White Crypt
ARTISTS & ARTWORK
Coptic Textiles
Donald Judd
Hans Holbein the Younger
Lee Krasner
Neil Cummings
'Rebel Without A Cause' 1955 film
BOOKS & WRITERS
Adam Phillips 'Attention Seeking' 2019
Ben Lerner 'Leaving the Atocha Station' 2011
Ben Lerner '10:04' 2014
Ben Lerner 'Contest of Words' Harper's Magazine 2016
Harriet Lerner, clinical psychologist and author
Isabel Hardman 'Why We Get the Wrong Politicians' 2018
Lidija Haas 'The Guardian' 4 Nov 2019
Owen Jones 'The Grammar of Ornament' 1856
Rachel Kusk 'Outline' 2014 'Transit' 2016 'Kudos' 2018
GALLERIES & ORGANISATIONS
Barbican Gallery, London
Girton College, University of Cambridge
Victoria and Albert Museum V&A
Friday Jun 11, 2021
Friday Jun 11, 2021
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 rebellion and suffering amongst individuals and the collective, including female power, body ownership, intergenerational identity, mental illness and a vast knowledge of plants used as a method of resistance. They also delve into the structural legacies created by the sugar, cotton and indigo industries; colonialism, covert operations, syncretic religions, and the rise of the blue devil.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
KAREN McLEAN
instagram karenmclean_art
karenmclean.co.uk
'Blue Power' 2021 Block 336
'Ar'n't I A Woman' 2021 Block 336
'The Precariat' 2017 Lewisham Arthouse
ARTISTS
Anish Kapoor
Donald Judd
Doris Salcedo
El Anatsui
Eva Hesse 'Contingent' 1968
Gees Bend Quiltmakers, Alabama
Ibrahim Mahama
Joseph Beuys
Kara Walker
Louise Bourgeois
Paul Goodwin
Sheila Gowda
Teresa Margolles
Theaster Gates
Tracey Emin
BOOKS ACTIVISTS THEORISTS
Alan Krell 'The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire' 2002
Alice Walker 'Everyday Use' 1973
Bell Hooks 'Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism' 1981
Deborah Grey White 'Ar'n't I A Woman' 1985
Edward Said (Professor of Literature, Columbia University)
Emily Zobel Marshall 'Anansi's Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance' 2012
Harriet Tubman, 'Harriet' film 2019
Hilary Beckles 'Natural Rebels' 1989
Homi Bhabha 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse' 1984
Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyst)
Sojourner Truth (abolotionist, women's rights activist) 'Ain't I A Woman' speech 1851
Toni Morrison 'Beloved' 1987
GALLERIES LOCATIONS RESOURCES
Afterprojects, Julie Bentley
Birmingham City University
Black Cultural Archives, Brixton UK
Block 336, Brixton UK
Gees Bend Quilting Retreat
Goldsmiths University of London UK
King's Cross Station, London UK
Shakespeare's House, Stratford UK
The Gale Plantation, Jamaica, Caribbean
The New Art Gallery, Walsall UK
The Steamhouse, Birmingham UK
Trinidad & Tobago, Caribbean
Monday May 24, 2021
Monday May 24, 2021
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 his clunky sculptures, social body-mind maps and his philosophical mish mash 'Metallurgy of the Subject'. We delve into the cracks between the flatness to explore ideas around satire, proliferation, bad infinity, socialist utopia, universal modes of seeing the world, common language, allegorical imagery, the importance of the father, avoidance of composition, a dislike for kinetic work, redundant technology, history as a bloody struggle and poo in sausages.
(This episode is produced by Jillian Knipe with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
DEAN KENNING
deankenning.com
instagram Dean Kenning notfairbear
'The Origin of Life' 2019
'Psychobotanical' 2019 Matt's Gallery
'Renaissance Man' 2017
'Metallurgy of the Subject' ongoing
ARTISTS
Antony Gormley 'Angel of the North' 1998
David Bowie (musician)
Emma Cousin 'Chats in Lockdown' podcast
English Heretic (musicians)
Hieronymus Bosch
Kiki Smith 'Her Memory' Fundació Joan Miró
Leonardo da Vinci 'Vitruvian Man'
Paul McCarthy 'Painter' 1995
BOOKS & THEORISTS
Benjamin Markovits (writer)
C L R James 'The Black Jacobins' 1938
Colm Tóibín 'The Testament of Mary' 2012
Franz Schubert (composer)
Immanuel Kant (philosopher)
J M Coetzee 'Disgrace' 1999
J M Coetzee 'Waiting for the Barbarians' 1980
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 'Erlkönig' 1782
Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyist)
Jean Fisher (professor, art critic, writer)
Jean-Luc Nancy 'The Inoperative Community' 1986
John Roberts (philosopher) 'Dean Kenning's Kinetics' 2019
Jorge Luis Borges 'Three Versions of Judas' 1944
Joyce Carol Oates 'My Life as a Rat' 2019
Karl Marx
Kazuo Ishiguro 'The Buried Giant' 2015
Plato 'Republic' 375BC
Russell Hoban 'Riddley Walker' 1980
Susan Buck-Morss (professor, philosopher, historian)
William Burrows (writer)
William Morris 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' 1885
Walter Benjamin (philosopher)
William Playfair (engineer)
TELEVISION
'Day of the Triffids' from 1981
'Dr Who' from 1963
Kenny Everett
Monday May 10, 2021
Monday May 10, 2021
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 she will be rescued. Interaction with other humans provides a whole different set of support and threatening challenges.
Identifying with Kya's barefoot 'n' wild soul, Kate MccGwire and Elizabeth Fullerton share stories of herons, crows, eagles, magpies, blackbirds, turkeys, pheasants, tropicbirds and the confounding snobbiness around pigeons and doves who are both part of the Columbidae family. They go on to explore snakes, oozing, gushing, skin, bones, intestines and scrotum' as well as darkness, resilience, rapture, seductions, repulsion, calm, turbulence, obsessiveness, working intensely, choir singing and Kate achieving a distinction for her dissertation at the Royal College despite being dyslexic.
(This episode is co-produced by Jillian Knipe and Elizabeth Fullerton with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)
KATE MccGWIRE
katemccgwire.com
instagram kate_mccgwire
'Cavort' 2020
'Sluice' 2009
'Sominal' 2019
ARTISTS & DESIGNERS & PERFORMERS
Akram Khan
Berlinde de Bruyckere
Doris Salcedo
Eva Hesse
Helen Chadwick
Helmut Lang
Hermès
Lancelot 'Capability' Brown
Mona Hatoum
Robert Adam
Thomas Chippendale
BOOKS
Annie Proulx 'Barkskins' 2016
Douglas Stuart 'Shuggie Bain' 2020
Khaled Hosseini 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' 2007
Margaret Atwood 'Dearly: Poems' 2020
Tim Winton 'The Shepherd’s Hut' 2018
GALLERIES & ART DESTINATIONS
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
Grand Palais Éphémère 'Art Paris' 2021 contemporary art fair
Harewood House, Leeds
The Lowry, Manchester
SERIES
'It’s a Sin' written by Russel T Davies
MUSIC
Benjamin Britten 'Peter Grimes' 1945
Henry Purcell 'Hear my prayer, O Lord' 1682
Henry Purcell 'Lord, How Long Wilt Thou Be Angry'