The weather forecast, my bank account and my diary are telling me summer is over. There will be no more 4pm wine glasses and proclamations of ‘it’s summer!’ Instead, there will be 4pm wine glasses and proclamations of ‘I have two more meetings and five openings to attend this evening and I want to die’.

Part of me is excited for the impossible artworld ouroboros of showing face, knowing more, going outside. My annual pre-Frieze flu shot is booked. Yet part of me also knows I’ll become easily exhausted, and after a week beneath bright white track lights in an icy tent in Regent’s Park I will probably lose my voice anyway.

And yet, we carry on, because we love beautiful things.

I’ve noticed a shift in how we talk about the need for knowledge. There seems to be a collective acknowledgement that – as speculated in her last Stocktake – we might be better off knowing less, and – I might add – knowing better. If energy is finite (trust me, it is) we might as well spend it in the right places.

So in honour of the autumn art season and in the (unbelievable) absence of a user-friendly/ up-to-date London art listings calendar, I have compiled a selection of recommendations for the next week that I hope will be nourishing rather than draining…

Going outside:

🛸 Hospital Rooms: Host/Guest at Victoria Miro, Old Street, opening 02 September, 6–8pm.

The 10th anniversary exhibition of Hospital Rooms will recreate artworks created for mental health spaces in the previous year, from Joy Labinjo to Alvin Kofi and Lonnie Holley. Coinciding with a fundraising sale of 10 limited posters by artists such as Celia Paul and Chantal Joffe. This will be busy and special!

🛸 Ruth Beraha at Alice Amati, Fitzrovia, opening 03 September, 6–8pm.

The first solo show in London by Italian artist Ruth Beraha, who has chosen to create a body of work developed from research into UK football culture, and accompanied by writer/critic/football fan Orit Gat. One wonders whether this was planned to coincide with the artworld’s reopening or the early weeks of the Premier League.

🛸 Jonathan Wateridge at GRIMM Gallery, St James’s, opening 03 September, 6–8pm.

I am slightly biased here because I have just started a new job at GRIMM – but I feel that, since my presence at the gallery was motivated by a longstanding and genuine love for its fabulous painting programme (my first ever published piece of art writing was on Louise Giovanelli!), I am allowed to include this. The references for these atmospheric paintings read like a list of my peripheral interests: expressionist cinema, mid-century architecture, Greek goddesses, enigmatic women.

🛸 Performance evening at The Perimeter, Bloomsbury, 03 September, 6–9pm.

The second iteration of the gallery’s annual performance night, featuring work by Solomon Garçon and H M Baker. Garçon’s previous work includes a publicly accessible Google Drive called SUNSET BEACH, which I think is kind of fabulous. I also love H M Baker’s late capitalist choreographies, with work including a long term project following the fictional life of a mid-level analyst called Maxine and wool-carpet close-ups of Aliens (1986).

🛸 Scarlett Topley at Interval, breakfast and reading, Clerkenwell, 05 September, 11am.

Lorette is a word for a 19th century French courtesan and also the title of Scarlett Topley’s show with Ed Ruscha at Interval, my friend Jacob and his dad David’s perfect gallery in Clerkenwell. I highly recommend you go and see this gorgeous, sexy and strange little exhibition before it closes (also on the 5th). I am in love with a painting of Perfume that I believe is inspired by the imaginary inside of Spencer Matthew’s Range Rover and a laser cut acrylic model of a motel complete with miniature sunset.

Media Diet:

• The latest episode of This Jungian Life:

OpenAI recently had to explain to frightened users why their models kept introducing goblins and gremlins into otherwise humdrum conversations. Is it possible that archetypes are emerging through the field of collective knowledge amassed by large language models (LLMs)?

So good. I have not yet listened but am about to board a train into the countryside, which is the perfect liminal setting for my favourite pod.

Parting thoughts:

• As I wrote in notes, hell is a floral ceiling display, £8 pint and sea of trainee analysts in sweaty shirts… men are strange in all industries, not just art.

• My wishlist writing workshop has not yet materialised, so if anybody has any recommendations for preexisting and non-threatening groups in London that I might be able to join for feedback, please let me know. I need someone to read my pigeon apocalypse short stories and tell me I’m not mad.

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Hello.

This week’s Work life is written by , who I first came across at a literary event in a boxing ring where she read alongside an Elvis impersonator. Bertie is a writer and screenwriter (she wrote The Moment with Aidan Zamiri) and she is also working on a book, an excerpt of which was read at said boxing ring event… it was really good. Oh, and she also sends a Substack newsletter called Disorganised attachment style, which is full of gorgeous restackable tidbits like:

“I think we should act with more entitlement over our cities. They do not exist to make money, they exist to hold us while we go about the crucial business of finding out what it really means to be alive.”

…and on that note – thank you Bertie!

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Do you have any daily rituals?

I write one page of a diary every night before I go to sleep. It’s really straightforward like I did this and saw this person and then did that. But over the years I’ve started being able to tell exactly how I was feeling on that day from the look of the page, like the tiniest shift in the slope of my handwriting or the size of the words. All my filled in diaries are my treasures, they’re like telephone wires between the different me’s across time.

Where do you work from – and why?

I like writing in coffee shops where they leave you completely alone, the Gails on Exmouth Market is good. Also the German Institute on Bloomsbury Square is beautiful and peaceful and just reopened. If the output is pure drivel sometimes I’ll write at home, like just smash at the keyboard with my eyes closed. It depends if I’m extracting bulk matter from my brain (i.e doing money jobs which require produce over quality) or trying to channel the heavenly muse, which requires a slightly more orchestrated environment.

Is your creative life work or play (or both)?

A bit of both. I think to play meaningfully you often have to start by setting boundaries. I love having rules so I can bend myself backwards to get around them. I like structure and structurelessness in equal measure.

What does success mean to you?

God I have no idea. A good hair day. Rent. Half a valium with no downside. Being recognised in a bar. Having my name printed on something which isn’t a utility bill. I should say making something meaningful that I’m proud of but that tends to be an extremely painful and humiliating process, so – I don’t know. Opening a perfect avocado. Writing something good is obviously the ultimate success. But what is good, and who do you really trust to know?

Who are your role models in work – and why?

Writers who really lived and who wrote real life into their work. Women who didn’t find success or recognition until later in life but never stopped. Jean Rhys, Anita Brookner, Barbara Comyns. A younger, male and alive writer being Bruce Wagner. I’m not saying I’m like these people, but I am deeply indebted to their work.

Who are your role models in life – and why?

Complicated women who don’t compromise on their independence yet find ways to live in abundance and in love. Happy, stable people who still want to write everyday. I can’t think of anyone specific. I don’t know if they exist.

Where do you turn to for guidance?

Long walks, alone or with friends. Walking and thinking are the same, and I’m a huge believer in letting your subconscious figure it out for you.

Does spirituality exist in your everyday?

Yes in the form of my cat Neptune, who I love in supernatural abundance.

How do you heal/relax?

I walk to the Prince Charles Cinema and watch something phenomenal. Donut and iced coffee on a bench. A lot of time in bed and I mean a lot.

What are your hopes for the future?

To put a lot of energy and time into screenwriting, which I find so thrilling fun scary exciting. To make things with people I love and am inspired by and feel myself around. To put something framed up on a wall in my flat. To get new cushions.

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Three books that have changed you.

Three I can see on my shelf as I type: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Also Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. There are so many more. Also Terry Pratchett and Jeanette Winterson. This is impossible.

One artwork that has changed you.

Botticelli’s Fortitude.

A picture of your happy place.

(If you do find yourself in Marseille, this year or in the future, Art-o-rama is super affordable to attend and has become a kind of gathering spot for emerging galleries wanting to break out of their local collector base [booths are much more affordable than other fairs]. It’s thus a great place to spot new talent. It’s also becoming somewhat of an artworld centre itself… akin to Berlin in its more affordable days. I know multiple gallerinas who have moved there over the past few years, and have friends who migrate there seasonally. It’s also, like, the South of France.)

Raque Ford at Good Weather, Chicago / Little Rock / North Little Rock

Raque Ford’s (b. 1986, Columbia, Maryland) CV speaks for itself: the artist has appeared in shows at places such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna and MoMA PS1. Her work is also in various esteemed public art collections.

I love the way in which Ford works with ostensibly shallow/ cold materials, like glossy laser-cut acrylic, and infuses them with sensitivity – through glitter decals, inks, watercolours, foils etc. And the slippiness of language – pulled from speech, pop songs, diaries, fiction – repeated and transformed.

When Ford first started using text in her work, she used sourced fanfiction… a genre which, with its Y/N interchangeable names and syntax of imagined intimacies, is driven purely by its prose rather than narrator’s identity. It reveals a fascination with language that manifests strongly in Ford’s work, alongside its perfect amalgamation of pop culture, social codes, New York, etc.

Jala Wahid at Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna x Triangolo, Cremona

Jala Wahid (b. 1988) is a British-Kurdish artist who completed her studies at Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy of Arts. She’s had recent solo institutional exhibitions at Tramway Glasgow and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and she has another upcoming solo show at Dock 20 in Lustenau this autumn. She’s also had coverage in lots of major art magazines.

Wahid’s work consistently investigates colonial histories – particularly that of Britain and other Western states in the Middle East – through symbolic objects like the above aluminium playing cards. These cards reimagine a set issued by the US Department of Defense as an attempt to help its soldiers identify archaeological sites during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and appear in Wahid’s film I Love Ancient Baby, also on display at Art-o-Rama. I love the ways in which her reflections on violence, grief and memory also possess this wonderful playfulness and vibrancy.

Marisa Delano at Window Fourteen, Geneva

Marisa Delano (b. 1991, Columbus, Ohio) is a self-taught artist and writer. Her photographic work and installations of mirrors have been popping up in various NY group shows and fairs in the past few years – last year she was chosen to appear in the curated section at NADA Miami.

I like the way Delano’s photographs of domestic spaces are transformed by the simple act of keyhole mounting: into settings of violence and intimacy. Their small scale also inherently implicates the body, which is a recurring theme in Delano’s practice, as both a vessel for performativity and an object of voyeurism.

Masha Silchenko at Dilalica, Barcelona

Masha Silchenko (b. 1993, Odesa, Ukraine) makes ethereal, washed out oil paintings, colour pencil drawings and delicate ceramics that remind me of childhood dream sequences, all fragmented images and inner landscapes.

Silchenko is very young but has had an illustrious training, having graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021 and done residencies/ exchanges at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and Geidai (Tokyo University of the Arts).

Michael Sandford at Season 4 Episode 6, London x LAILA, Sydney

I discovered Michael Sandford through an ant farm – installed as part of Jean Watt’s curatorial practice A Place to Rest at a church by Flexitron gallery – and have been following his career from afar ever since. As the ant farm (and pixelated paintings) suggest, Sandford’s works are about negotiating distance: it feels suitable that, when viewed up close (you’ll have to take my word for this), his colossal images drift almost into abstraction. I love the hazy line between digitally induced distance and painterly intimacy that they straddle.

Sandford graduated from Slade School of Fine Art and Monash University. He has a few exciting things in the pipeline: he’ll be showing as part of Minor Attractions during Frieze-time, and has presentations at both Season 4 Episode 6 and LAILA next year. Still early days!

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Hello.

This iteration of Work life is written by , whose weekly newsletter is an injection of romance to London life and a reminder that even city-dwellers (!) can live a poetic existence. I am also very inspired by AVM’s immense creative energy – which spills from the screen into merch, live salons, collaborations, etc. This is a rare gift in today’s grindset world, and one which I am trying to embody more of myself.

I have changed the format of this series slightly – less intro and more questions, because other people’s voices are invariably more interesting than our own. So enjoy.

Thank you so much AVM, you’re a star!

Subscribe now

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Do you have any daily rituals?

My relationship with the morning is devotional. I seize it and fill it, laying rituals at its feet.

This looks like leaving the house as close to waking as possible, with as little weighing me down as the day permits. What follows can and often includes walking, coffee, swimming, connecting, collecting, smoking a single cigarette over the course of the day.

Where do you work from – and why?

A few days a week, I work from a first floor studio in Haggerston, co-running an everyday design gallery, Unit.d. We are a workforce of two, working days which are never the same, surrounded by physical ephemera in the form of my colleague’s archive of books, objects and misc other bits, collected over a 25 year career. We share a pot of black coffee, and sometimes some Italian biscuits on a glass plate.

The rest of the time, for AVM and its studio-related work, I write either from my pale pink plinth desk (pictured) at home, or from my lap, phone, pen to paper. I love my desk, I bought it for £60 from eBay and a beautiful person with a shaved head dropped it off. As befitting something made and shared with love, I have placed my favourite shells and pens upon it.

Like most freelancers, I wander to public libraries, cafe-bookshops and other hospitable places to try and churn out the words. With nowhere do I have a happier working relationship than the high window seats of the Barbican’s ground floor café. Perhaps Brutalism begets efficiency, or maybe my need to get up every 6 minutes to allow the words to dry on the screen is best beside silhouetted city church spires and a bright green lagoon.

Is your creative life work or play (or both)?

I feel most worth my while when I’m working, and can only play when I am safe. The intersection of both is where the best things get made.

What does success mean to you?

The goalposts move all the time. Once you reach them, they seem to have moved far into the distance. Sometimes success looks like getting to the next morning, alive. And I never feel more successful than when I meet an AVM reader in the wild.

Who are your role models in work – and why?

Greg Stanley, Editor in Chief of Off Licence Magazine, aka Offie Mag.

I’m not biased because Greg is a friend, I’m his friend because I’m biased. Does that make sense?

Let me put it this way, it all started with a poem, and now our friendship is one too. Greg has updated the old adage do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life into work with your friends and you’ll make the best stuff ever. Offie Mag has reinvigorated a generation of British young people to value print media, underground music scenes and gathering in person. E-I-C by name and nature, in that he is Editor in Chief, and Everything he touches, Is Cool.

Who are your role models in life – and why?

I am learning all the time. Mostly from the missteps and misalignments handed my way by those who came before. I love people! Really anyone who crosses my path can model something for me to learn.

Where do you turn to for guidance?

My brothers, my dreams, round the kitchen table with the girls at home.

Does spirituality exist in your everyday?

In signs, symbols and seeing 4:20 whenever I look at my phone. Making meaning out of molehills, following threads until they join a greater loom.

When I’m in other countries I split my time equally three ways - supermarkets, holy buildings and the sea. In London, it takes a little more effort. So spirituality comes in whatever suggests stillness, in talking to other people about their beliefs and creations, in returning to what felt good before, and the day’s final sticky thoughts before sleep.

How do you heal/relax?

This area of my life is undergoing essential maintenance works…it’s helpful to have those two words paired together; historically I have only allowed relaxation when there was healing to be done. By this metric, it comes in moments of crisis, when to not relax a little would mean far worse things to come.

But lately I have learnt the benefits to flipping an old saying around - have travel, will love. When I can go elsewhere and live anonymously for a while, I return with stretchier skin, light in my eyes and more patience in my heart.

What are your hopes for the future?

More print media, more being interviewed about AVM, more making things for the sake of them, for the chance to create something with someone else. Connection will be our salvation. Staying in touch is radical in a world which suggests we can get all we need from an individually algorithmed phone.

And dancing and kissing, always more kissing.

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Three books that have changed you.

Daydream & Drunkenness of a Young Lady by Clarice Lispector (Learning to write drunk characters taught me how to write sober)

Courting the Wild Twin by Martin Shaw (Shadow self, connecting to my 3 years older but in many ways twin brother)

Offline Matters: The Less Digital Guide to Creative Work by Jess Henderson (Map as manifesto for the twists and turns toward creative fulfillment)

One artwork that has changed you.

Vergesslicher Engel (Forgetful Angel) by Paul Klee

A picture of your happy place.

There are a few places in London that have paid witness to numerous breakdowns (and breakups), bad jobs, worse dates, unwelcome encounters, etc. and remain favourites… the Barbican (big, cement womb) is one, the Tate (both of them) another – nothing could dull the feeling I get upon entering the spaces, which is probably childlike regression but manifests as a sense of childlike awe.

So the double whammy of Tate Modern + Ana Mendieta is a full time-travel moment, back to the high-ceilinged classroom of my high-school art days, where my poster girls (predictably) consisted of Cindy Sherman (specifically, the sex pictures [1992]), Tracey Emin and Mendieta. I can’t remember what my fascination with the latter was founded on – something narrow and tragic, I’m sure – but my encounter with her at Tate felt distinctly new. I think this says less about my ignorance as a fourteen year old and more about her mythologisation in society, which – predictably – has centred on her death.

I am reminded of Janet Malcolm’s Silent Woman (one of my favourite books), on the mythologisation of Plath, in which she writes:

Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it.

Instead, the Tate show is centred on living!: the displaced body, the desiring body, the body in nature. Mendieta’s work takes male-dominated mid-century Conceptualism and infuses it with the magical mythologies of ancient wisdom and feminism. I stand for a long time before her late earth-body sculptures: silhouettes of the abstracted divine feminine sculpted into sand, mud or stone. One of them, Untitled (Guanaroca [First Woman]), is carved directly into a limestone cave wall in Jaruco, Cuba, and holds a vagina-like opening between voluptuous legs like a precious jewel. Guanaroca is a Taíno deity of Caribbean indigenous mythology – the first woman, borne of the moon. Apparently, Mendieta wished for walkers to encounter her sculptures devoid of context – like primeval feminist motifs of a timeless past.

I’m reading Deborah Levy’s ‘Cave Girl’, a strange little story from her perfect anthology Black Vodka:

Sometimes I lie flat out on the gravel under one of the new shrubs and feel the electricity charge me up… It gives me a thrill because I know the world is very old. At night, I sometimes hope that an Ancient will find me shivering in front of the TV eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.

It is reassuring, after all, to believe in the enduring power of ancient truths. I need an Ancient to find me now. We’ve got things to discuss and I know he could help me. He would have answers to where souls go after death and how people transform themselves from one thing to another.

I too lie flat out in my parent’s garden and stare up at the night sky awaiting a solar eclipse and think of the moon’s countless cycles.

Mendieta’s ancient wisdoms are injections of magic into the cold everyday. They are a reminder of bodies existing in other ways: unconstrained by the thin space between glass-fronted high rises and the pixels of a computer screen. Bodies exist as traces of energy in ashy silhouettes, or carnally uninhibited and rolling in feathers. It feels serendipitous that moon cycles and menstrual cycles are almost exactly the same duration.

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And now – because I can’t pretend I’ve spent all of my sacred time between jobs staring at the moon or in art museums (rather than staring at a screen) – some interesting albeit slightly random links:

I’ve spent years trying to live by my mum and Jemima Kirke’s favourite catchphrase – ‘you’re thinking about yourself too much’ – but a recent series of events provoked a minor crisis of confidence as I discovered that what they say is true: other people don’t harbour the allegiance to you that you’d hope they would. Devastating. Luckily I was quickly cured by Tim Kreider’s perfect essay on two-faced hypocrisy and unconditional love, which ends with the perfect phrase “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

Despite the bleakness of many of Kreider’s NYT headlines – ‘The Unbearable Sadness of Your Parents’ Bad Holiday Gifts’/ ‘“Quirkyalone” is Still Alone’/ ‘You Are Going to Die’ – reading him is strangely uplifting, because you are reminded that – despite the latter headline – in the end, you are not alone. As my mum (or Jemima Kirke) might say, you’re actually just like everybody else.

Another genius: JG Ballard on the images that influenced him and the case against wall-texts (I agree)... inc. Cravelli’s annunciation (which he says is, to agnostics, a surrealist image), Paolozzi’s His Majesty the Wheel (with echoes of Crash) and the Super 8 footage of Kennedy’s assassination.

I just finished Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards in record time. Notwithstanding the disappointing ending, I loved the campy, violent, synth pop of it all, and I can’t stop listening to Icehouse loud in the car that I’ve just re-learnt to drive and pretending I’m in LA not Cheshire, which is easy in this weather but a little embarrassing. I did try the Kaia Gerber series because I’m selfless and lasted all of ten mins – don’t bother. It’s not sexy.

With time saved not watching aforementioned adaptation, last night I found myself down a Hegelian e-girl rabbit hole sparked by dead eyed $ Dasha on my phone screen. Luckily, I narrowly prevented existential despair by finding myself directed to an old ArtForum feature by bell hooks on Quentin Tarantino (the link is cynicism, btw). Read this:

Tarantino has the real nihilism of our times down. He represents the ultimate “white cool”: a hard-core cynical vision that would have everyone see racism, sexism, homophobia, but behave as though none of that shit really matters, or if it does it means nothing cause none of it’s gonna change, cause the real deal is that domination is here to stay—going nowhere and everybody is in on the act. Mind you, domination is always and only patriarchal—a dick thing.

Tarantino aside, this statement could be transposed to a lot of the cool-kid nihilists (does that make me sound like an old person lol) floating about on social media, in art galleries, at literary events, etc.

While we’re on telling it how it is, I’ve been searching around to find something good to read on Ozempic, and anorexia, and Hollywood skinny (a difficult task - I’m open to recs). I could write one myself, except I’m too emotionally invested – if I see one more woman railing against ‘skinny shaming’ after rapid weight loss and newly formed jowls I might go mad.

Instead, reading that I recommend: ’s beautiful essay on the importance of speaking up for ourselves, not just our idols. <333333 So we should all go and tell our friends that they are beautiful just the way they are. because they are!

Bisous!

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Hello.

I’ve been so excited to publish this week’s Work life by , who I’d been aware of as an editor for some time but whose work I actually only really got to know through her Substack (thank you Substack!) which is fabulous and fierce. Her novel American Thighs is my Americanophile (?) celebrity girlhood dream, and I am currently waiting for it to arrive in the post. As well as being a writer, Elizabeth is also the owner and Publisher of the wonderful HOBART, founder/editor of Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a podcaster AND a mentor (another thing I am very excited about is her plan to start year-long mentorships and workshops soon).

Elizabeth has been described by others as a ‘literary godmother’ and ‘writing the way Bret Easton Ellis would if he had actual balls’ – both of which I think are amazing things to have said about you and are making me super excited to read American Thighs. At the moment, she is publishing excerpts from her upcoming memoir on her Substack and they are equal parts moving/funny/relatable/gripping/honest. The last quality is my favourite thing about Elizabeth’s work… she is so completely and unapologetically herself and is fabulous and creative and free because of it. We should all be more like this.

Thank you so much Elizabeth!

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Describe a typical week/work day, wakeup to nightfall.

On a typical weekday, I get up at 830-930 (I wish it was earlier! I keep trying to wake up earlier but I just stay up too late!), make coffee, let the dog out.

Then I sit down to write. I try to go as long as I can. this could be anywhere from one to six hours, depending on where I am in the writing process of a book. Currently, it’s about 2-3 hours. I also might spend an hour editing other people’s work/writing or reading someone else’s manuscript (a friend’s). or just reading a book. Or making a recording for my podcast on Substack.

After that I take a bath or shower, walk the dog, and go to Starbucks for an iced coffee, run any errands that need run. After that I go somewhere to get “online,” as I don’t have WiFi at my house. Sometimes I flip errand running and go in the Starbucks and start working online. If I run errands first, then I might go to the library near my house to work after errand running. At any rate, I try to work as long as possible, two to six hours. answering emails. Updating social media. Formatting pieces for Hobart (the literary journal I edit). Reading/editing/accepting pieces for Hobart. Catching up with friends/family on iMessage. Working on my Substack (my new passion haha). maybe make a post on Substack or upload a podcast episode.

Depending on what day it is, I may run to a 12 step meeting and/or meet a friend or friends for dinner. Or book club. Or to walk.

I may go back to the library or Starbucks after that if time.

In the late evening, I take my dog on an hour walk.

Do more reading/editing, listen to podcasts while cleaning or putting laundry away or whatever.

And then I go to bed, about one or two a.m.

I don’t watch TV. Sometimes I will go to a movie.

Oh, I usually go for a drive after walking the dog to smoke a couple cigarettes as I don’t like my neighbors to observe me smoking (I have never seen anyone smoke in my neighborhood!). Then I listen to a podcast and go to sleep.

So, I’m very work focused at this point in my life. but I love my work. I enjoy reading/editing/writing/publishing and soon I plan to add overseeing workshops and yearlong writing mentorships.

Where/when do you do your best work?

I do my best creative work at home. And my best online work at the library.

What does success mean to you?

Success to me means I am financially independent. It also means someone somewhere looks to me for advice or for help with writing/editing, because I have worked very hard for twenty-five years and I am happy to share my knowledge and experience with others who want it. it also means sometimes I get an email from a person I don’t know telling me they have read one of my books (the best!).

Who are your role models in work – and why?

My best friend, Chloe Caldwell, is a role model. She’s a hustler. Neither of us has a college degree and we are both self-taught, but she is often more of a hustler than I am, as far as self-promotion and earning money through her workshops and classes. So I am trying to learn that hustle from observing her. :) she makes it work. she never complains. She never victimizes herself. She just works hard and figures it out and gets it done.

Have you ever compromised your creativity for success?

No, and that has cost me – an agent, and probably a bigger book deal/bigger publisher. But I wouldn’t change it.

Are you spiritual?

Yes, and more so now that I am sober and working a 12 step program. I meditate and pray much more now, as I did when I was a young child, but got away from for many decades. That did not go well. I don’t recommend getting away from spirituality.

How do you heal/relax?

Many ways today. Walking, either with my dog or friends. Reading. Meditating and praying. I get a massage now and then. I listen to listen to Zen Buddhist teachings on YouTube every night. Going to 12 step meetings. Hanging with my girlfriends and my daughter and son-in-law and my step-daughter and her husband and daughter. Therapy and work with my 12 step sponsor. Go to the zoo or a metropark, nature trails.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Oh, geez. I don’t know. Maybe to focus less on men and romance and more on myself and my writing? Lol but then I might not have my daughter or she might not have had such an amazing stepfather (and me a best friend) so… I don’t know. Maybe just to remember this: you’re stronger than you think you are and you will be ok.

What are your hopes for the future?

That I am always able to be independent as a woman – financially, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. And that I am able to continue writing books, publishing books, editing Hobart, traveling, and living a sober peaceful life with many friends and dogs, my daughter, son-in-law, stepdaughter, her husband and daughter. And, of course, to have an “airport bestseller” and/or a book-to-TV/movie adaptation! Haha.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Or: writing is the affliction for which only writing is the cure. And also (my favourite quote, because I am a control freak and also an [occasional] runner):

If writing is control then to have writer’s block is to be totally helpless. I find the resultant despair even more acute during summer, because of the promise of valuable writing time, and the pressure that comes with making the most of that. I imagine that artists and freelancers feel the same… because holidays contain the dual promise of relaxation and the most precious luxury of all: time.

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It [inspiration] can be like striking a damp match again, again, again: hoping a small flame will leap out, before the match breaks.

I have also been thinking also about inspiration and social media. The artist is meant to rise above the homogenous cultural landscape borne of internet culture to create something original, and they are also required to participate in it (how else will anyone know about your uber-original work?)

In a wine-fuelled conversation with a friend earlier this week, we discussed envying our successful seniors – museum directors, editor-in-chiefs, bestselling authors – for their cultivation of, say, 10k+ followers on Instagram, while seemingly remaining able to treat the platform solely as ‘work’. Their friendships exist off it. So do their nighttime routines. And their drinks of choice. And their nose pores. etc etc.

On the other hand, we Gen-Zers came of age during Web 2.0, meaning that our pubescent self-discovery (and adult identities) became inextricable from our navigation of a new online landscape. And then we grew up and became writers, and artists, and our identities – see, online personas – became inextricable from our financial rewards – see, ability to survive – as well.

Anyway, I dunno, enough existential stuff. The biblical heatwave and proliferation of pigeon-eating seagulls around my flat are contributing to a bizarre and slightly apocalyptic atmosphere in the city. London in the sun is seeped in low-level mania and an overspill of nervous energy. I’ve deleted Instagram from my phone and I’m hoping for the best.

Today I visited an exhibition of work by a perfect example of self-motivated inspiration (and, I guess, inspiration amid nervous energy): Richard Dadd, whose dark fairylands were mostly painted from the criminal psychiatric institutions of Bedlam and Broadmoor, following a psychosis-induced case of parricide. The exhibition catalogue posthumously diagnoses him with schizophrenia (which these days would have likely been mitigated by anti-psychotics). Most of the works that Dadd painted in incarceration were done so through imagination or memory, which proves the pretty obvious point I guess I’ve been trying to make throughout this brain vomit: that the best art is made at a distance from constant stimulation.

(And also, the best art is rewarded by slow looking… the Dadd show made me want to order a magnifying glass and return.)

Post-exhibition I traversed my own courtroom-and-hospital Sunday evening, drinking tomato vodka spritzes and eating sour cherry trifle/cassata siciliana/rosé poached peaches in Sessions, followed by a tipsy trip to hospital for sporting injury/holding hand duties. Alas, the 4+ hour wait in A&E is – guess what – yet more free time to make the most of, and so this is where I write to you from: phone on aeroplane mode and bum hanging half-off a plastic waiting room chair that I’m sharing with the casualty. I love waiting rooms. So many story ideas to be harvested. And on that note, real life calls, in the form of x-ray results.

Bisous!

Hello.

For the third iteration of Work life, I have asked food scene superstar and expert in the world of taste, Panayiota Soutis, to reveal her secrets. Pani’s Substack newsletter, The Goal is to Eat, was one of the first that I came across and loved on the platform, and I’m in awe of the way she approaches the worlds of hospitality and culture through the overarching lens of interpersonal connection and fulfilment. For example, in May TGITE launched their first public index of London-based, women-owned hospitality businesses, alongside the inaugural edition of An Audience With: live discussions surrounding various themes across hospitality (the next is on 27 July, with early access for paid subs). TGITE is my go-to guide for navigating London’s hospitality and culture worlds… and for the best restaurant recommendations… highly highly recommend!!!!

I thought that Pani would make a really interesting subject for this series because I’m always interested in how full-time writers (slash creators-curators-consultants) balance their time… particularly those who participate in the newsletter/ subscription economy. Pani wrote about this recently for a dispatch from ’s Feed Me, which profiled various writers juggling the appetite for a constant stream of content and the oft solo nature of newsletter building. Below, Pani talks further about the thin (or nonexistent) line between work and socialising, prioritising creativity and the power of escaping one’s day-to-day environment.

Thank you so much Pani!

Describe a typical week/work day, wakeup to nightfall.

I have no routine, which I find freeing, but sometimes I wish I could be a little more regimented, or move with some sort of respect for a weekly pattern. Perhaps chaos is my consistency? Some days I’m home in the morning, working at my dining table, and usually I’m out from lunch through till late. I like to work from Soho, I like to work with my creative collaborators or around my clients. I like to co-work with industry friends though our schedules hardly ever seem to align.

I socialise a lot for work – lunch meetings, evening events – and my job requires me to speak to people constantly. I think things through by chatting them out, and I’m energised by others, so I spend most of my days talking, writing, note taking. Some days I’ll come home totally wiped and realise I’ve engaged with 50+ people in person, through WhatsApp, email, Instagram and phone calls, which can be too much for one day.

Where/when do you do your best work?

Under time pressure, late at night, on a plane, on the bus, in total silence sitting alone, while walking and talking, and in overstimulating public spaces. I’m adaptable, but my best ideas and solutions have always come out of conversations with my boyfriend. He’s extremely wise. Realisations, breakthroughs and sentences will often come to me unexpectedly, and execution will arrive more steadily, with gentle preparation and an intense bout of productivity at the last minute, once everything is clear in my mind.

What does success mean to you?

Satisfaction with myself. To know that I’ve made myself proud (I am my harshest critic) and to build a life filled with my desires: do whatever I want, go wherever I like, and buy the things I fancy.

What are your biggest challenges in work? How do you overcome them?

Holding strong in my decision-making, having patience with myself, setting clearer boundaries.

Existing more like a man, moving with relentless self-compassion, not always replying instantly.

Who are your role models in work – and why?

So many women, across many related industries across culture, building something for themselves, and doing it their own way.

Have you ever compromised your creativity for success?

I don’t think I’ve ever prioritised creativity until the last year of taking The Goal is to Eat seriously – and finally realising that I’m an inherently creative person, 20 years later.

Are you spiritual? If so, how do you practice this?

I’m quite superstitious, very numerologically inclined, and I clock signs everywhere. It’s humbling knowing that you are but a mere speck within our inexplicable world, and comforting to be constantly enveloped by something much more powerful than you’ll ever be. I also wear a lot of meaning-laden charms around my neck and wrists, which I use as talismans of strength to fuel my spirit, keeping me energised and connected to my people and myself.

How do you heal/relax?

Hugs heal me. Long ones, multiple times a day. Long hot showers too. I love passing time totally distracted by real life: off the internet, engaged in conversation, exploring somewhere, absorbing art, looking up, seeing details I haven’t noticed before, sitting around a dining table with people I adore. Travelling, being away from home, inspired by existing in another realm and picking up new experiences and observations, renews me. But, I’m my most relaxed by the Med, swimming in the sea, breathing in a horizon, and soaking in the moonlight. I feel like I have to escape my day to day environment to truly rest.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Believe in your brilliance, spend time getting to know yourself, and treat yourself with the same care and patience you give so passionately to others.

What are your hopes for the future?

To remain open and curious, to always move with compassion, and ensure people feel seen. To be an original. To make myself proud.

Salvador Dalí house, Cadaqués: a labyrinth of fisherman’s huts and taxidermied animals, the beating heart a dome-like room drenched in pink light, built by the artist for his Russian goddess, Gala. Upon entrance, a real polar bear – a gift from the British poet and patron Edward James – and a vulgarly upholstered iteration of the infamous sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips… good art ≠ good taste.

Other highlights: a phallic swimming pool/ man in the wall/ tiny cages once containing crickets, for the artist liked to sleep to their sound. Three stuffed swans, wings outstretched – once the pets of Gala and Salvador, who are photographed on the Portlligat beach nearby with them.

The spectre of Gala, who is omniscient but also eerily absent from the house and its decor, which is seeped in sex. Ten years Dalí’s senior, formerly married to Paul Eluard (with whom she had a three-year menage à trois involving Andre Breton), Gala was both muse and wielder of that intoxicating weapon… desire. For a period, Dalí would take to signing his paintings ‘Gala Salvador Dalí’, and in later years – after buying her the Castle of Púbol, agreed only to visit when Gala had given him permission, in writing.

During my visit, a very sweaty man – who has that terrible male affliction for the monologue – pulls a book from Dali’s bookshelf and begins to flip its pages, as the tour guide looks on despondently. Can I do this? he says, but he has already done it. No, she responds, but he has already done it. Gala above, scorned now, visitors traipsing plastic-soled shoes beneath her sacred boiled-egg roof.

In the dressing room, a collage: Dalí on TIME, Gala and swans, Mae West, Laurence Olivier as Richard the Third, Franco.

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In the hills above Figueres, the expat journalist tells me that my generation needs to get a grip on cancel-culture. Figueres is a nice city, with a Gothic and Romanesque cathedral and medieval structures – it is easy to see why its occupants raised some objections to the erection of an ostentatious self-conceived monument to artistic genius: the Dali Theatre-Museum. Some speculation occurs over whether the small gold protrusions which mark the building are loaves of bread (the breaking of bread among the hungry masses) or shits (a symptom of Catalan scatology) ... the answer is the former, which reveals a lot about Dalí’s ego. And how to reconcile this ego – fascistic and male – with the childlike curiosity and Gala-goddess divination of the artist in love?

Inside the museum, upon first encounter more vulgar even than the home: gold-mannequins and a gift-shop rendition of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; velvety red walls and reproductions of Chagall, and Matisse, and Picasso; the nude back of Gala and the pixellated image of Abraham Lincoln. A self-portrait, in which skin is emptied of flesh and pierced by crutches. A rasher of bacon sits at its base. The sense that this artist constructed an echo chamber for himself: a church and a maze of fisherman’s huts which reflected his own performance back at him, a lover who shielded him from the uninspiring task of contracts and economics. The sense that, while presenting himself as a mask or a soft shell, the artist is still only human. A prominent curator tells me that for those who grew up in the Spain of the eighties, Dalí was a clown: a pop culture figure whose surrealism was overshadowed by the crassness of celebrity. In Spain particularly, the site of his life, he is a widely reviled figure, associated with a difficult past.

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In Barcelona, reading a Joyce Carol Oates short story about a girl who ate her own twin in the womb, only for it to reemerge from brain matter in her adolescence, birthing itself as a skinless sac equally reviled and revered by the girl’s family… a monstersister. Later I will read an essay by the author about running and writing:

Dreams may be temporary flights into madness that, by some law of neurophysiology unclear to us, keep us from actual madness; so too the twin activities of running/writing keep the writer reasonably sane, and with the hope, however illusory or temporary, of control.

In this heat, I walk – to Gèneres de Punt La Torre, a lingerie shop that opened during the turn of the 20th century, and is still run by the third generation of its original owners. Here I buy cotton boxers and panties: Brandy Melville style with nostalgic charm. Then to a jewellery shop, where I depart with a disgusting amount of money for a 3D-printed plastic ring. Like running and writing, shopping makes me feel in control.

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At dinner, alone: cava, anchovies, Calabrian sausage, patatas bravas, salted tomatoes, Catalan bread in olive oil, chickpeas and bacon, more cava, more anchovies. A conversation has occurred: about a Condo painting hanging in a local museum, and about Condo himself; his self-assuredness. The idea of the male artist genius persists. There are no artists untouched by this trope.

I am wondering how to reconcile the image of Dalí’s past with the significance of his work, which is an unoriginal and age-old question. Dalí is only one of many male artists who have historically been exaggeratedly revered to bloated proportions, prompting indignation when it is revealed that their artistic talent is not messianic and they are flawed. A woman as contrarian would likely not have been indulged by her peers so readily.

As far as I am concerned, Dali’s major flaw was his ego, although perhaps it was also this ego which allowed him such a generative impact on art. Dali’s ego, in pursuit of provocation and unreliable narration – a 20th-century edgelord. If his life was shaped in service of his own mystique, his chauvinism strips him of enigma… Dalí was a whore for fame. It is the figure in his shadow – that of Gala – which is much more interesting to me. Gala… the mythologised Madonna… she who dispelled her maternal instincts… engineered fortune and directed success… inspired the devotion of her many lovers… sovereign of her own small kingdom amid the hills of Púbol. When Gala died, Dali wrote: “Everything celebrates the cult of Gala.”

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Patriarchy would have you believe that Gala lived in service to male genius, transposing her motherly assets from her daughter to her lovers. Yet this fabulous article by Nina-Sophia Miralles, in The Paris Review – titled When Your Muse is a Demonic Dominatrix – offers a glimpse into what was really a true ruthlessness…

At her best, Gala was difficult and intense. At her worst, she was nothing short of monstrous. She had no friends and maintained a malevolent distance from her family. Described as “cruel, fierce and small” and having “eyes that pierced walls,” she collected stuffed toys but once cooked her own pet rabbit. Her “demonic temper” asserted itself often; if she didn’t like someone’s face, she spat at them, and if she wanted to silence someone, she would stub cigarettes out on their arm.

At the end of her life, well into her eighties, Gala maintained a handful of young lovers and took to gambling away her money in New York’s underground casinos.

In the late seventies, she became besotted with Jeff Fenholt, who had played the title character in the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and during their affair, she gifted him several Dalí canvases and bought him a house on Long Island valued at $1.25 million. Dalí himself found out only when he saw Fenholt had put his artworks up for auction at Christie’s.

Like the women in JCO’s short stories, who forego motherhood, subsume themselves in the name of seduction and enact violent and clever justice on predatory men, Gala reveals that which we often don’t want to acknowledge about fame, or life, or femininity… that they are invariably more complex than they might first appear.

I sent out an email on Sunday, which fell victim to my chronic social media commitment issues (posting and deleting). If you still have it in your inbox, no you don’t. Anyway, I feel kinda bad about it so I wanted to share something else instead, and when I was thinking about what to do/write/brain vom, I was reminded of this article I wrote in 2024 for the third issue of The Toe Rag, which was themed ‘Dream Work’.

In the years since writing this I have become very fond of This Jungian Life and I am currently on a bit of a spiritual/meditation journey, so it feels very pertinent. Also, I just mentioned a work in it – Nina Davies’s Stepping into Machine, in an article I wrote on art and technofaith… so it’s on my mind. I remember the process of writing this piece so clearly… as though the act of documentation was cartographic in itself: tangential and horizontal and revealing itself slowly. I remember being really excited for this to be published because the wonderful Sophie Barshall of The Toe Rag had managed to acquire permissions to a Susan Hiller dream map to accompany it (below).

Before we begin, a condensed version of some recommendations I gave in my now nonexistent Sunday dispatch… I am currently reading Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds, which is divine. And Strange Attractor’s fifth journal, which is perfect and making the world seem a little more magical. Highlights include: a nineteenth century psychic botanist from my grandparents’ hometown who I’m now writing a short story about; an essay on whether the man who crucified himself on Hampstead Heath was a performance artist; Victorian electronic music. I’ll tell you about the art in the next Show Notes. Now back to dream maps. Enjoy and sweet dreams xx

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“Maps are dreams: both describe desire”, Kathy Acker

I - DREAM (SPECULATIVE) MAPPING

A few years ago, I began taking a new medication. It had a long list of unwelcome side effects, but the only one which seemed to affect me immediately was the sudden onslaught of lucid nightmares. I’d always kept a dream diary, but now my entries were cinematic: abstruse visions with the narrative complexity of a good short film. At around the same time, I began reading Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984), a hallucinatory novel composed of plagiarism, poetry and wildly fragmented prose, which charts the ten-year-old protagonist Janey’s journey from Merida, Mexico, to the New York City underworld. Blood and Guts speaks to the voices in our heads that flit between the facets of our identities, the ones which – given free reign – might have the capacity to develop into neurosis. After all, thought is less a linear progression than a great big barf of intermingling and interpenetrating experience: of movies, books, relationships, subconsciousness, and finally, reality.

Perhaps because of my state upon first reading it, my favourite part of Blood and Guts has always been its dream maps, which– though they appear within the book– stand as coherent works of art in their own right. Since Acker was so concerned with the “materiality of language” (see her essay Against Ordinary Language [1993]), it makes sense that she would allow her subconscious thoughts (dreams) the same spatial qualities as her novels. ‘Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matters’, Acker writes, and her cartographies are suitably complex hieroglyphic pictographs: cross-sections of her childlike unconscious, where thoughts need not be a continuum, nor part of a larger narrative, but simply to exist as their sometimes disturbing and often conflicting selves. Dream maps in any form are unconfined by various earthly restraints; whilst maps are traditionally rooted in time and environment, dream maps exist across it, stretching beyond both setting and individual.

Acker’s maps are the visual counterpart to her disjointed prose, which acts both as a topological reflection of deconstructed identity, and a metaphorical reflection of the unconstrained, unconditioned mind. In Dream Map 2, a phallic white worm chases the author towards death, pervaded by the presence of sexual violence and surrounded by references such as the 1959 film Black Orpheus, as well as voodoo and the yogic teachings of Swami Muktananda. ‘I’m a writer. I use this identity to protect myself,’ a burst of language punctuating the space reads. Another: ‘Who am I? I want to be the mermaid, the seducer of men, sex, but I’m not, I’m the squat fat woman with a cigar in her mouth’. These are Acker’s– or Janey’s, or my own– fears, perhaps all at once. After all, for Acker, ‘I’ is an amalgamation of mythology, culture, desire, fear and relationships, manifested in novel form; identity is as entwined with the collective as the individual themselves.

I grew up thinking of maps as objective mediators; destinations (answers) rather than sites of possibility. Maps were the thick curled paper booklets in the musty glovebox of my grandad’s car, they were checklists on school hikes in the Pennines, they were framed and yellowing and Welsh in downstairs bathrooms. I learnt of maps as scientific but not artistic, interesting but not imaginative. Acker’s maps taught me an anarchist approach to cartography, treading the line between reality and unreality, truth and lie (as does her fiction). She taught me that no map is fixed or factual; all maps are the historically contingent political fictions of their time and setting. In this sense, mapping has always been a medium in flux; something capable of stretching beyond just representation. Mapping is embedded in both the minute particulars of our own lives and the covert structures which govern them. Whilst we rely on the readiness of GPS cartographies to show us the way, the same technologies map our own bodily metrics. Acker’s maps acknowledged the body as producer, too, but less of data, and more of stories, complexity, empathy, and dreams.

Here dream mapping takes on an expanded meaning, dreams in their broadest sense– as in sleep, or as in ambition– being works of speculation. Acker’s maps are both products of her own experiences and evidence of a universal, human complexity. They are autobiography, fiction, mythology and sleep-vision at once. Though retelling one’s own dreams might commonly be seen as a surreptitious act of narcissism, the subconscious is never linear. It extends outwards beyond the individual, like a web (or a map). As I read more of Acker’s bibliography– such as the collage of biography and appropriated text in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973), or that of Great Expectations (1982)– I began to think of my own nightmares less as fearful reflections of my unknown subconscious. Instead, they became, like the protagonists in Acker’s novels and dream maps– manifestations of the universal divided self, that which overlaps with others and seeps between the rational and the nonsensical, the dreamt and reality.

Ten years before the publication of Blood and Guts, the artist Susan Hiller produced Dream Mapping (1974), a ‘paraconceptual’ experiment-cum-performance, in which seven participants slept for three nights inside the ‘fairy rings’ of Western European folklore, circles formed by the natural growth patterns of Scotch Bonnet mushrooms. In the morning, each sleeper transferred their night visions onto paper, and eventually all were transposed to create a collective notational system of dreaming. This system was inspired by by the art forms of Indigenous American and Australian Aborigine groups, in which dream maps are not visually literal representations, but rather what Hiller calls a ‘set of notes in visual diagrammatic form’. They form a visual language unconfined by country, or even world: one bridging spirit and human form.

Hiller and Acker had a mutual friend in the writer Paul Buck, who the latter met during the late 1970s, whilst Buck was the editor of the arts publication Curtains, which published writers such as Bataille, Blanchot and Derrida alongside the works of artists like Hiller. It is tempting to wonder whether Acker encountered Dream Mapping at the time. Certainly, the artist’s remarks surrounding her artwork ring true to Acker’s attitude to identity. ‘One person is many voices but there is no bounded unit who contains them,’ Hiller told frieze in 1995. ‘They could be seen as possibilities of being.’ Her maps, like Acker’s, are illustrations of the divided self: these possibilities of being, their overlaps manifested in spatial form. There is something reassuring about the self as a kind of mycorrhizal network, thoughts and bodies entangled with those of others, and the map as a form suited to understanding it.

In the same year that I started my medication, the artist Claire Barrow held an exhibition in Soft Opening’s Piccadilly Underground space, titled ‘Pig Latin Library’. It felt suited to its liminal setting; like dreams, train stations are sites of limbo (in between destinations). The show itself was a visual re-imagination of the artist’s dreamworld, of the Egyptian gods and stairways to heaven hung with dismembered limbs. Its title was a reference to a secret language shared between children; an invitation to engage with the innermost psyche of another and discover a world not so unfamiliar after all. A couple of years later, Barrow showed me a labyrinthian diptych painting titled Pipe 1 & 2 (2021): a nightmarish rendering of the artist’s birthplace and her new home, London. It was her recurring dream, bubblegum-coloured and violent, involving a hooded figure driving a princess to prison, and tangled blonde body parts falling onto whirring blades. Barrow told me that as a child, she had believed that her dreams were caused by signals from the phone tower which shadowed her childhood house in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham. I spotted one on her canvas, glowing white and electric.

II - SPECULATIVE (DREAM) MAPPING

Whilst dream maps stretch beyond spatial realities, they are often (somewhat paradoxically) rooted in them. Acker’s novels and maps frequented cities, such as New York, San Francisco and London; after all, cities– like dreams, made of proverbial desires and fears – are sites of transition (again, limbo), of coming and going energy. In Philosophy For Spiders (2021), McKenzie Wark writes in relation to Acker: ‘Cities are places for fucking, not just by humans. Cities might look like giant dick-farms, with all those skyscrapers, but are also made out of pipes and tubes and tunnels. Cities too are penetrable and penetrating’. They are juxtapositions: facilitators of power and settings of resistance. Maps, and consequently cities, have been used throughout history as forms of colonial and territorial control; the identities of marginalised people have historically been overlooked by both. Enter speculative mapping, a radical creative methodology which physically makes space for what could have been and may have been, but what was erased from the archival tomes.

Speculation goes against the very nature of the map as answer, or map as fact. Last year I visited an exhibition at London’s Mimosa House, conceived by the artists Naomi Woo and Sophie Seita in conversation with a queer-feminist collective called The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, which situates the garden as a haven for anti-institutional, radical communities. In the show, titled ‘BingenTV’, speculative mapping situated queer histories, as ‘deviant’ forms of history, within the city itself. One wall was covered in a collage of photographs, documenting recent gatherings of the society alongside images of ‘suspected’ members, which include the likes of Mary Seacole, Derek Jarman and Adrienne Rich (note: suspected). It presented/charted/mapped a ‘parafictional’ vision of reality, described by the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty as “related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature [the archive], but has one foot in the field of the real.” ‘BingenTV’ posits ‘parafiction’ as a reparative force, thereby inserting queer histories into the archive. This is the radical potential of the unofficial account, built upon the scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that “instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments.”

Nowadays, the archive is complicated by the digital, which, like the city, is so saturated with the production of information that its filtration is required to facilitate any kind of individual perspective. Though digital media exists outside of the material, it nonetheless retains spatial and speculative qualities and is therefore game for mapping. Our journeys (digital footprints) through it are – like those AFK (away from keyboard) – as important in the formation of identity as our physical experiences. And much like AFK society, in the same way that the internet forms a method of control for the majority, it can be a space of resistance for the minority: a community-building tool or a setting (as elucidated by Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism [2020]), for the dissolution of binaries, particularly in terms of gender and sexuality. The internet is a world unto itself, complete with communities, economies and power structures; it can be mapped.

The artist Nina Davies literally implicates digital culture in reality; the physical environment, à la the speculative map. My first encounter with the artist Nina Davies’s work was through a show called ‘Flop Era’ (2023), curated by Kawaii Agency– for the exhibition’s opening, at Filet space in East London, her journey was live-streamed directly from a selfie stick-mounted phone to the gallery via TikTok. As she travelled across London, the boundaries of Davies’s bodily movements were disrupted to become public rather than private: her journey became a performance. In Stepping Into Machine (2022), a camera traverses a fictional dystopian metropolis in which ‘techno-faith’ worship is prevalent, particularly the creepily robotic ‘bionic step’ dance (harder than it looks), which evokes a futuristic version of the 16th century European dancing plague. Like Acker’s dream maps, Davies’s speculative digital journeys straddle the lived and the performed; fact and fiction. Like our dream personas, our online personas are the product– at least somewhat– of our desires. Acker once said: “maps are dreams: both describe desire”. Maybe, like our dreams, our online existences are just as revealing as our movements AFK; perhaps within the confluence of the two, as Davies illustrates, lies our true individual and collective subconscious.

“Dreams call the vision world to break loose our consciousness”, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. The same might be said for speculation in its broadest sense, ranging from ‘parafiction’ to science-fiction. Dream mapping– or, in its expanded form, speculative mapping– consequently becomes a radical methodology of accessing our individual and universal fears and desires, in all of their complexity and non-linearity. The western canon has taught us that maps are terminus; they are where we end our route. Art – as it often does – revokes this. Maps are sites of possibility; they are dreams.

Today I ask Ella Fleck to talk me through her work/life. Ella is an artist/ writer/undercover agent whose work I have loved ever since I reviewed her show at Season 4, Episode 6 for The Toe Rag. It was an exhibition/ pheromone hotbox about men looking for sex through experiments in bioengineering, during which beautiful Ella cosplayed as a love-hungry stalker named Jonathan Michaels for seven months.

I thought that Ella would be a good person to speak to for this series because I am forever in awe of the way she flips between the darkest corners of internet forums/ chemical compounds/ laboratory lighting and divinity/ tea drinking/ qi gong. It’s a very modern thing, I think: being online and also spiritual.

Ella has an upcoming group show at Ehrlich Steinberg this year, which is an LA-based gallery whose programme I love so I am very happy about this.

Thank you Ellaaaaa ♥︎

Describe a typical week/work day, wakeup to nightfall.

Every day is different. If I’m lucky I wake up and go for a walk or do yoga but most of the time I rush out the door to a random job or a meeting, sometimes I go straight to the studio.

I do lots of different things which I like, but I do have some rules. Like I don’t work at home or on my phone now which has been amazing. I keep my work and actual life separate. If I’m spending a lot of time in the studio or working on the computer I take a lot of time outdoors in nature so I don’t go insane. At the moment I try to see friends a lot because the project I’m working on is kind of solitary.

Mostly I am simple though, I leave the house to whatever it is I need to do, maybe see friends or go to an event in the evening, then I go home and watch something or read, bathe, moisturise and fall asleep listening to gongs. I love sleeping. So much.

What does success mean to you?

I’m not sure, I guess a feeling in yourself that what you’re doing aligns with you. And of course financial stability and the sense that what you’re doing connects with people who aren’t just your friends.

Who are your role models in work – and why?

I think artists like Goshka Macuga or Anicka Yi because they move through different materials and ideas in a challenging way. Goshka Macuga’s work is so interesting and weird. I loved her recent set design and performance hall for Miu Miu and the animatronic she made of her boyfriend at Prada Fondazione a few years ago. Anicka Yi’s work is always complex and open and beautiful and unnerving no matter what scale she works on. Nicole Wermers, Julia Scher, Agnes Denes, Sophie Calle, I think Amalia Ulman is inspiring for leaving the art world and pivoting to film. I like a lot of musicians because they move through different phases, like Andre 3000 or Bjork, Laurie Anderson. Nigella Lawson … Britney

Have you ever compromised your creativity for success?

I don’t think I’m successful enough to have done that yet luckily

Are you spiritual?

Yes. I love all forms of divinity and faith and it is a big part of my life.

How do you heal/relax?

Drinking tea, sleeping, sunbathing, qi gong i learnt from an ex, sitting in the park, getting a massage, scrolling……. Sometimes I really like just staring at the wall and brushing my hair. I listen to classical music a lot lol and cooking. Last year at a difficult time I spent 2 weeks in silent retreat with Carmelite nuns which was very healing.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

chill out baby it’s all okay and it’s not that deep

What are your hopes for the future?

I hope for a joyful and fulfilling life filled with love and family. Career wise I’d love to do set design for a fashion house, work on bigger institutional projects and keep finding ways to make things I am excited by.

My London Gallery Weekend (LGW) began in a violent rainstorm on Southwark Bridge, breaking a sweat on a Lime bike with only one working (front) brake and wiping the water from my sunglasses with outgrown acrylic nails. The low-lying hangover I’d mysteriously managed to accrue from two ‘interactive’ cocktails (see below) at the Serpentine reception the night before wasn’t helping my general feeling of panic at the prospect of cycling another thirty minutes to the ends of the earth… South London.

Now – Sunday – I write to you sitting fragile upon a throne of lemsip and Tiger Balm and tissues in my sickbed, thinking: this is what happens when I leave Hackney. But that’s the beauty of LGW: it takes you to untrodden realms to see unfamiliar – and sometimes good – art.

Here are some of my favourite things!!!!

Prunella Clough, Thomas Dane Gallery

One of my favourite shows. I have always been drawn to beauty of industry (bc I am from the NORTH, if I didn’t mention), which is distilled into Clough’s postwar ‘urbscapes’: scenes of factories; wastelands; warehouses. Their abstraction of an urban essence – at once so unnatural and inextricable from nature – is delicious. I first saw Clough’s work in a shopfront at my friend ’s gallery Flexitron. The modest setting felt quite suited for an artist known for selling her work disproportionately cheaply in studio clear-outs… god, I wish I’d been there. This show of works from the 80s and 90s is predictably beautiful, I really think that I could live with any and all of it.

Jemila Isa, Maureen Paley Studio M

This show is a joint first with Prunella – Emily and I loooooooved this exhibition. The works unfold like a fairytale: of womanhood, spirituality, selfhood and the church. This series was inspired by a dream and the film Black Orpheus (1959) and evoked an intensely magical atmosphere through spare brushstrokes: red skies and a young bride’s powdery dresses and the cool shadows of a chapel.

There were lots of beautiful postcard-sized works on paper for sale in the office (£800 each) that would be perfect for a first-time/young buyer/my bedroom wall.

Candace Hill-Montgomery, Hollybush Gardens

I made a quick trip to Hollybush Gardens after glimpsing Candace Hill-Montgomery’s stunning weaves on ’s Instagram story. I love the way these works thread so many references and moments and movements – Black Arts groups, feminism, the Black Panther Party, Hill-Montgomery’s career as a model – so seamlessly into mohair; silk; the cache-sexes of the Cameroonian Kirdi groups. They’re gorgeous three-dimensional poems, whose cherry on top is their rhythmic, riddle-ish titles: like Pope L’s T Raining Day or A Thousand Hours Reasoning Troth With Sword Swallowers’ or How is Loves Distance Approximated.

Ted Le Swer, Soup Gallery

Back in South Emily and I saw wonderful Ted speak eloquently about his technically quite complex show, featuring UK weather surveillance cameras/Bambi/a Friesian cow in Lewes (the lying down sort, able to detect changes in atmospheric pressure) captured by visual effects software/a pinhole camera/16mm film. What does Bambi have to do with ecological mediation? we wondered, and were duly informed that Disney remakes the film’s trailer periodically to reflect its present year’s major sociopolitical issues. I could not verify this online, but during the course of my research I did come across this other interesting fact, courtesy wikipedia:

“On December 17, 2018, a prison sentence passed against a man, in what is considered the biggest deer poaching case in Missouri history, contained the stipulation that the prisoner must view the film at least once each month during his one-year prison sentence”.

Honourable Mention: Caspar Heinemann, CABINET

If you didn’t know, I’m obsessed with aliens, so I dragged Emily through wastelands (Elephant & Castle) to reach Vauxhall in the pouring rain and stare at a fake alien autopsy for fifteen minutes. Honestly, there were lots of things I found funny about this show, like the ridiculousness of the grey man’s three-toed feet in the pretentiously silent gallery space, or the final line of the exhibition text, which read:

“My paintings on cork board are remarkably inaccurate and demonstrate a low level of astronomical understanding.”

I like someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously. I, for one, just couldn’t take any of it seriously (in the most wonderful way), because of the strange little guy just lying there in the middle of the huge, echoey room.

Other (actual) honourable mentions: Alvaro Barrington at Emalin, Helen Marten at Sadie Coles, Eileen Agar at Alison Jacques, Steven Shearer at David Zwirner.

Byeeee xx

Going outside:

London’s entire artworld braved the sweltering heights of Alex Petalas’s attic office on Thursday to see Camille Henrot at The Perimeter. I have liked Camille Henrot’s work ever since she did a joint exhibition with Estelle Hoy (who I really like).

The Perimeter show is full of naughty drawings and a painting series called the Dos and Dont’s, which combine excerpts from medical bills, code and an old book of manners with layers and layers of meticulously applied paint and ink. The point is (I think) that external and longstanding systems of control and hierarchy are just as present in the digital world as they are in family structures. I liked the contrast between the precisely applied backgrounds and addition of icing-piped 3D paint to the surface, it was very ASMR.

On Wednesday I saw Camille talk at the Mayfair farm shop of Artfarm (Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality offshoot), where I drank copious amounts of delicious wine and ate similarly copious amounts of Manuela and Iwan’s famous scotch eggs. Camille and Polly Staple (surrounded by fabulous women!) spoke about the internet and drawing and the opera that the former is currently working on (this is genuinely my dream gig). Sometimes I think I hate art and then I remember that I don’t, it’s just that you have to sift through many an egoistical man and lots of brain rot zombie abstraction to feel inspired again.

Then around the corner to Galerina, for a duo exhibition of Mariann Metsis & Liina Siib. I’m obsessed with Galerina’s space, it’s just so weird, with a strange diagonal wall and a corridor at the end for skinny people only. And I think they have a really fun, and unique programme, I can’t think of another space in London showing art quite like it. I loved the photographs of Estonian photographer Liina Siib, whose images of post Soviet mid noughties domesticity were both mundane and fabulous in their technicolour frames.

The Emalin world takeover continues with an exhibition of punk rock baby dolls and Penny Goring-esque glitter glue drawings by rock musician (The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black)-cum-‘shock artist’ Kembra Pfahler. I think there’s something to be said for shows of paraphernalia/ art that might not be the most technically advanced but give a glimpse into the mind of a really interesting person. I actually think drawings might be my favourite medium for this reason, they’re often less mediated and more intuitive and revealing than their toiled over their painted counterparts.

Neven also have a fun show titled You’re only happy when you can see something die!, which I think is a fabulous title for an exhibition. Inc. the most wonderful photographs by Greer Lankton. Makes me think about death and dolls, and Alissa Bennett’s most recent column in Texte zur Kunst about ET and New Humans and Oskar Kokoschka’s life-sized replica of Alma Mahler, which he eventually poured a bottle of red wine over and then decapitated. Also about my favourite writer Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Doll, a tale of a man’s obsession with a mysterious violinist which was lost for more than 70 years before being republished in 2011. I particularly like Ki Yoong’s gorgeous painting of Marilyn Monroe, WHICH brings me to my next rec…

Marilyn Monroe at the National Portrait Gallery! Opening on 04 June. I will be happily parting with £27 to see Marlene Dumas’s Dead Marilyn in the blood-drained flesh.

My final rec (though I could go on) is Francis Picabia at Hauser & Wirth. I could take or leave Roni Horn next door, tbh, but I love the Picabia show, it’s a pretty amazing chronological walkthrough of his hugely expansive career. I like the way he paints women’s faces, with this kind of death-mask or doll-like sheen, it’s rather unsettling. There are quite a few artists experimenting with the same effect in portraiture now, I think, and it’s interesting to notice who did it first.

Media Diet:

(You should really subscribe to Side Eye 1. Because I edit it and 2. Because there is a fun essay dropping on Monday about astrologers-cum-art advisors and the shared roots of astrology and modern [speculative] finance.)

This month I took a day trip to Charleston Festival (immortalised by Jamison for Elephant here). The chatty kid at the farm shop asked us what we were doing in Lewes (we were the youngest people at the festival by about twenty years), and I felt kind of affronted – I love Lewes and I am itching to turn forty and have kids and move there and spend my days writing folkloric short stories and imagining I am Vanessa Bell without the complicated love life (or maybe with).

Anyway, after spending about three hours picking apart every book in Clive Bell’s study (Olivia by Olivia, lots of Apollo magazines, Art Lies Bleeding – a great name for a book about the art market) we saw some great panel discussions, inc. Robin Ince taking down Clive Myrie (known in CSM circles for calling a pro-Palestine student a ‘fucking idiot’) and Alice Oswald on writing with a conscience. Now I’m kind of obsessed with Alice Oswald; I’m currently reading Falling Awake and The Odyssey side by side.

Also reading: Tributes to Etel Adnan, because I have loved Etel Adnan from afar ever since reading Shifting the Silence at university. This book is a collection of essays and tributes from friends/collaborators/admirers like Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, Isabella Hammad and Emily LaBarge.

I was reading: Murderland by Caroline Fraser, which sounded really interesting (it’s about the proliferation of 20^th century serial killers in the American Midwest which links their crimes to toxic fumes emitted from smelting facilities), but the prose jumped around so much – in date, location, subject – that I just couldn’t get into it. I might try again soon, because it has great reviews. Also fascinating to learn about the Guggenheim fortune, built on mining and smelting metal – once upon a time its company was responsible for 90% of US lead production.

Listening to:

I’m going to see Brian Jackson at Church of Sound this week, I’m sooo excited. I’ve only been to Church of Sound once before, to see a tribute to Roy Ayers, and it was (as expected) a very spiritual experience. The acoustics are surprisingly good and you can buy a plate of food and drink beers by the altar.

Shazam’ed at 3am at Hackney Wick community saunas, lol.

Listened to while taking off in tin can plane over turquoise waters. This is what life’s about!!!!!!

Help I can’t stop listening to the marty supreme soundtrack, which is surprisingly Mancunian. My embarrassing new personality trait.

Parting thoughts:

New Work life interviews coming soon with some amazing women. Kind of want to turn it into a live event, watch this space.

જ⁀➴

Byeeee Xxx.

I thought i’d forego my usual brain vom to get some people I admire involved with Beautiful Gowns <3333

& when choosing a theme, I picked something that’s been on my mind A LOT recently… the balance between work and wellness/ commerciality and creativity. HOW do these amazing women make careers of their creative pursuits (yes it’s possible!!!!) Topics include: is there a secret to balancing commercial success and creative integrity? How do you prioritise your work without sacrificing your personal growth? Must you have faith? Does a fulfilling career really exist?

Obviously the first person I turned to was , the founder of Worms & Seed Readers, and the co-founder of Compost Library. I have admired Clem ever since she was a few years above me at Central Saint Martins and I think that everything she does is so exciting but also intellectually rigorous and full of integrity & love for art. Thank you Clem you’re the best !!!!! ♥︎

What does success mean for you?

Impact! Seeing how someone has been changed/inspired by anything that we’ve published in Worms, or by attending one of our workshops. Those are the moments that feel the most fulfilling. I suppose ‘fulfilment’ too, in that case.

Who/ which brands are your role models in work – and why?

Martine Syms - all of her work is perfect.

Isabella Burley - everything she’s done with has brought much needed attention to the wonderful world of books.

Chris Kraus & Semiotext(e) - Chris helped me fall in love with reading again, and Semiotext(e) was a major catalyst for the creation of Worms.

Have you ever felt as though you have needed to compromise on your creativity to achieve success? How did you deal with this, and stay true to your original values?

Not to achieve ‘success’ as I’ve defined it above, but perhaps to bring some commercial traction. I think it’s a balancing act. I would never compromise anything editorially, but in the past I’ve definitely embarrassed myself to sell magazines. That sounds quite sinister, but only in a lighthearted way. Worms is a C.I.C. so by that very nature it’s value-driven; if compromises are made, they will be on a more personal level, but I quite enjoy taking the piss out of myself anyway.

When did your work start gaining traction – and why?

Honestly, it’s been a really gradual process. Rushing has never worked for me. I’m chronically impatient, and building something this slowly (but consistently) has been a huge lesson, but it’s worked!! Everything that we’ve done has been very organic. I’m quite a firm believer in divine timing; it reduces disappointment, if nothing else.

What are your favourite ways to nurture your creativity/ relax?

TM! I practice Transcendental Meditation every day, twice a day when I’m being strict. I’ve also done the Artist’s Way about a hundred times which sounds quite counterintuitive, but it’s the ritual of having some sacred creative space at a set time every week that has always really driven me creatively. I’ve never stuck to Artist’s Dates, but I do find a weekly trip to the bookshop very healing. If it’s a newly discovered one, even more so!

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Stop comparing yourself and stop worrying - everything is working out exactly as it should. Be patient, work hard, be kind and amazing things will happen.

What are your hopes for the future?

Honestly...more space. More intuition, more writing, more reading, more patience, more trust, more presence, more intention, more clarity, more art, more conversations. Less emails, less screen-time, less stress, less worry, less comparison, less caffeine, less ‘catching up’. No Instagram, no negativity (particularly towards self!), no judgement (particularly towards self!), no rushing, no doubting, no confusion.

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Reading true crime about London’s oligarch underworld in my haunted hotel room. Tonight Emily and I will take photos on my incredible gold bed and a spirit orb will appear as a streak of light on my phone screen. Show yourself I will say, and the next picture will be Emily, wide-eyed, and a perfect white circle above her.

I am usually terrified in hotel rooms, especially dark, wonky-floored hotel rooms which remind me of The Yellow Wallpaper, but I am waking up in a strangely calm mood here. Perhaps it is the low-lying hangover from the five Cynar spritzes I drank last night.

I dress: a plain white t-shirt, capris (elevated basic), sweaty leather ballet heels which everybody told me not to wear here but as I replied to everybody, I do not wear trainers.. I am in the hotel’s annex, which is not really in the hotel at all, and my door opens into a shadowy alleyway in the backrooms of San Marco. I slip from my gaudy Venetian cell into a crowd of thick-accented, thick-waisted Americans. I spend €3.80 on a pistachio creme croissant and whole milk cappuccino and the man who serves it to me calls me princess, which for some reason feels more fatherly than creepy coming from an Italian.

This is my first time at the vernissage week of the Venice Biennale, and also my first time in Venice. At 3am on Wednesday I did not really feel like getting the 6am flight out of Heathrow and spending a week marooned in a vicinity whose only exit is through water with the entirety of the art world. I was quite tired. I am still quite tired, but I love it here. I love being called a princess and six euro cigarettes and rolling out of bed to beauty from all angles.

11:00

I am on the top floor of a lombardesque palazzo considering whether to get a tattoo reading радість, which is the Ukrainian word for joy. This is part of an artwork in the collateral exhibition comprising primarily Ukrainian artists that I am here to cover, hosted by the Kyiv-based PinchukArtCentre (you can read my coverage here). The exhibition is about radical happiness, and it is an inspiring antidote to much of the ostentatious crap populating the city this week. Hanging contemporary art in an ornate fifteenth century palace is a very easy way to weed out the bad stuff.

This palace is also unique, because it is not as shiny as, say, the Pinault Palazzo Grassi or the ACP–Palazzo Franchetti across the canal. It’s dark and a bit eccentric, like my hotel room. Once upon a time it was the home of Princess Polignac/ Winaretta Singer (heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune) who held salons there with the likes of Stravinsky playing on one of the princess’s four prized pianos. But I digress – one thing I have discovered is that all Venetian buildings have somewhat fascinating histories.

In my commissioned piece, I did not write about my favourite artwork here, which is a video by the artist duo Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk called Open World. Khimei and Malashchuk are known for their depictions of war mediated by modern technology. In this film they have adopted a military-use robo-dog to enable a boy exiled in Poland to remotely control its movement around his Ukrainian home town. At one point, robo-dog stares blankly at a real cat in a face-off. The boy pleads with his pet to recognise him, but there is an irreconcilable distance between them.

At the press preview, there are two Ukrainian soldiers in full uniform. One of them, Hlib Stryzhko, is a marine and a former prisoner of war. Their testimonies structure the exhibition, but many of the artists are also military personnel. The cinematographer Yuri Gruzinov tells me about an impromptu performance he staged within the Russia Pavilion the day before. Dressed in his Ukrainian special forces uniform, he listed the names of Russian participants down in a conspicuous red notebook. The work’s title roughly translates to something like Fucking Assholes (2026). Iconic !!!!

15:00

Legs hurting at the Arsenale. It takes me approximately twenty minutes to comprehend any art in the group exhibition at all, because adjusting from navigating (avoiding) a bustling crowd of vaguely familiar people to contemplating an exhibition whose premise is ‘spiritual and physical rest’ is surprisingly difficult.

The structure of the exhibition is also obfuscated, which would be ok if it was smaller, but is rather overwhelming when navigating vast warehouses containing the works of 111 artists. That being said, some of the art is genuinely amazing. The show markedly elevates the Global South – I really liked this review on Ocula by Zian Chen. I decide that I must return later in the year, sans crowds, to actually surrender myself to the exhibition’s non didactic logic.

Highlights include:

• Kaloki Nyamai’s monumental hanging textile/paintings Kwata Kau, Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, and Ithyonze nitwavika vaa (2026).

• Kader Attia’s Whispers of Traces (2026), a poetic, hallucinatory room fusing African ritual statues and modernism, with a shaman’s hypnotic words as the backdrop.

• A quiet listening lounge dedicated to Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening, which – for the thirty seconds I wear its headphones – succeeds in calming me with its brain-massage melodies.

• Alfredo Jaar’s dramatic red-light, chapel-like installation, which reaches its climax in a plain vitrine containing a small, glinting cube of precious materials: a shrine for Western economies.

• Hagar Ophir’s ouija board evocation of colonial violence and the collective restitution of memory.

I also visit Gabrielle Goliath’s independent presentation of Elegy, staged in a stunning 4th century church. It is the perfect setting for a work of mourning requiring deep engagement. I find it much easier to lock in within this ecclesiastical space than the busy chaos of the shipyard. When I spoke to Goliath before the Biennale’s opening, she told me that “Sometimes protest can be as tender and beautiful as recalling a name”.

20:30

Dinner at Trattoria alla Madonna with Emily and . I order Bigoli in salsa, despite our waiter’s protestations that I will not like it unless I am a seasoned pasta expert. I assure him that I love anchovies and onions because I am not a child and, sure enough, the pasta is delicious. Ever since I saw Nigella scoffing spaghetti at the River Cafe a few weeks ago I have decided (or am telling myself) that there is nothing sexier than saying fuck you to Ozempic culture and scoffing a load of carbs. Could I be a different kind of woman, to whom this thought doesn’t even occur? The kind of woman who ate carbs whether or not Nigella is the most beautiful woman in Britain or the gallerist I bumped into in the street said she hadn’t had a meal all day? Anyway. I also consume: a dubious looking but delicious artichoke heart, a bucket of homemade icecream, some wine, and of course, a Cynar spritz.

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00:15

Later, at the BMW (x Preis der Nationalgalerie) party with Zander, taking turns to ambush the waiters/sailors who are serving champagne at infuriatingly irregular intervals. Funny speech from Klaus Biesenbach et al during which they refuse to give the microphone to Maurizio Cattelan, who cannot stay still and is wearing his sunglasses on his forehead. Finish with a drink in a dark alleyway before falling asleep to a book chapter on the Cipriani Five deaths in my regal bed.

Friday, 14:00

This is embarrassing. I spend the hours of 9:00–14:00 in one of three Venetian Starbucks, buying bottles of water for the Wifi code and a seat within plug socket reach. File my copy. Feel a bit dirty as I leave Starbucks, like I have committed Venetian sacrilege for being there, which I probably have.

16:30

Emily and I join the Art Not Genocide Alliance strike/protest outside the Giardini. There has been a strange tension at the Biennale this year, between the atmosphere of celebration and indulgence which pervades big-budget drinks receptions and the ubiquitousness of the fondazione (as diagnosed by ) and the armed guards standing outside the Israel and Russia Pavilions. At first I felt sorry for the girl at the entrance of Israel, greeting scowling onlookers with a smile, and then I remembered that she probably chose to be there.

The journalist Alex Marshall has posted a list on Instagram of closed Pavilions, which I will immortalise here for accountability:

It’s easy to forget the violence and inequality that structures an industry ostensibly predicated on open expression and critical engagement, but the strike is a stark reminder. The familiar faces I bump into there or see participating via social media gives me some glimmer of hope.

20:15

I finish the day sharing a magnum of orange wine on the canal in Cannaregio with new friends and school friends, which I imagine is a lot more fun than the numerous events I am not invited to. More pasta, more cigarettes, dreamy. Venice at dusk is magical, the city has a romantic energy obscured by the bustling crowds at the height of the day.

Saturday, 11:00

After a failed attempt to access the Giardini due to my three-day press pass (I later learned that they’d have let me in anyway) I embark on a quick tour of collateral exhibitions. I am in a bad mood because of the local election results in London, so I decide to head only to shows that have been recommended to me, because there is nothing as depressing as bad art and nothing as inspiring as good.

My highlights:

At Palazzo Grassi, Michael Armitage is predictably incredible. His masterful use of colour lends highly political and often disturbing scenes an even more dramatic emotional resonance. He engages with mythology and hallucinatory dreamworlds in a way which escapes the too-often obfuscation these topics give rise to in contemporary art. My favourite painting is one titled #mydressmychoice (2015), a Rokeby Venus-styled portrait of a young woman attacked by a mob in Nairobi for wearing a miniskirt.

The Sanya Kantarovsky show is also very good. What seems to me to be dreamlike or cinematic images of a sinister boyhood reach their apex in a Murano glass sculpture of a boy’s head, which looks like it contains a spider. This kind of weird, uneasy art is my favourite, and it is a nice, subtle antidote to the flashiness of a lot of work displayed throughout the city.

19:30

Going home! Booooo.

On the Wizz Air flight to Luton, I bump into , who looks very chic and professional with her quilted red Chanel bag, pencil skirt and suitcase. As for myself, less so. On the plane, the lady next to me orders the entire contents of the snack trolley and I try not to barf as I have a minor crisis about everything that I was unable to see during my brief trip. Alas, I must return in the near future. I am particularly upset about missing:

• The Holy See Pavilion garden, and the Patti Smith performance at its inauguration (I wasn’t invited)

• Björk performance (also not invited)

• Arthur Jafa x Richard Prince at Prada. I did try and go to this, but it was towards the end of my stay and therefore I could not face another queue

• Fondazione Dries Van Noten

• Austria’s body-fluids-and-sewage waterpark (rumoured to be fake piss, fyi)

• The ten people I said that I would go for drinks with and then got too overwhelmed to text back

Vernissage week suffers from the same predicament as an exhibition opening: its conditions are totally adverse to those best suited to viewing art. It is, however, a fascinating cross-section of both the artworld’s most vulgar traits and its most generative ones. For every farcical privately funded or propagandised display is a genuinely transformative one. For every war-mongering nation there is a group of people mobilising in resistance. I guess that, at the end of the day, it is all a reminder that events like this do not exist in a vacuum. We need the discourse, the press and the popular dissent that accompanies the exclusivity if we want to support the culture that facilitates our fairground week of fun. Violà!

Anyway, a Whole Foods is about the only thing that could redeem the site in my mind. I’d read ’s tribute the night before and put the ten minute trip in my diary. What a glorious Saturday, I thought, as I threw an £8.99 half salt pepper rotisserie chicken into my basket, followed by a pint of organic milk and some Bulgarian rose water. It only costs my monthly salary to experience true happiness: a mouthful of Ortiz sardinas and some wholegrain sourdough dipped in organic olive oil.

Talking of fatty stuff, I spent the afternoon researching a (relatively) new trend in the looksmaxxing/self-optimisation mass hysteria: cadaver fat transfers. It’s pretty self-explanatory – the procedure involves the harvesting of bodily tissue from deceased donors for cosmetic purposes, like boob jobs or butt lifts. I am not a candidate for this. I am scared of needles, a fact I have realised after being sent a kit of peptides which have sat in my fridge for two months. But, apparently, lots of people are unperturbed by injectables containing dead person rice pudding because they don’t have enough fat on themselves, even when the ethics around it are dubious.

The reason this is interesting to me is because of something I’ve been (non-)articulating in my head about the proliferation of lifelessness, or ‘lifelessness’, in modern beauty standards: a woman posing over a marble countertop clutching a cigarette/ twelve step biotech and light therapy routines/ the supplement stocks of a rich person and the glazed-over gaze of a lifeless one. Women, I think, are encouraged to exist between life and death: between health and hedonism, or longevity and invisibility. Even more so nowadays, we can no longer just live as humans, we have to live as microplastic, and machine, and ‘personal brand’, etc. It’s very overwhelming.

Perhaps you could say the same for men these days, as well. Smashing your own jaw doesn’t seem very ‘body a temple’. One particularly interesting account of the cadaver transfers that I read was of an NYC clinic conspicuously named Alpha Male Plastic Surgery. At Alpha Male, the injectables are used to enhance pecs, biceps and calves. Apparently, looksmaxxed (“alpha”) men are so ripped that they have no fat themselves to use for liposuction.

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“I am obsessed with the smallness of the body” Miuccia Prada said to Alexander Fury for AnOther magazine following Miu Miu’s AW26 show in March. I read the review after a friend sent me a social media post doing the rounds on Instagram, of a dead eyed, harshly lit Kristen McMenamy in a tulle, bejewelled mini dress. ‘Miu Miu Finds Strength in the Human Body’, read the headline, accompanied by comment section furore over the model’s gaunt appearance. “Post-apocalyptic soulless ghouls? No thanks, hard pass.” “The moment they leave the underground bar and it is already morning…” “Omg ! They look like corpses...” etc. etc.

Behind the rage-bait headline, Fury’s review makes some small admissions to the true nature of the show. He clarifies that Miuccia’s aforementioned quote refers to the body ‘in a human sense’ – “small girl, big world”. He writes “the room was engineered as a frame around a consistently diminutive body, for all genders” and mentions Prada’s use of trapper hats to diminish the bodies beneath them. It doesn’t take too much reading between the partnerships-pleasing lines to get the gist of the show’s Alice in Wonderland-sydrome vision of extremities. Small f*cking girl !!!!!

So I guess, considering the state of the world right now, cadaver fat transfers aren’t that ridiculous. They’re actually the obvious next step up the impossible aesthetic ladder, the natural physical extension of a certain infamous ‘body trend’ (umm) named after the opioid crisis. Even the dead can’t escape beauty standards. I imagine myself one day as a corpse in pearls: an anatomical Venus with organs splayed out and a sobbing doctor asking why the hell there is no boob fat for him to harvest… ha, ha. Or maybe in a few years I’ll be the one stealing the boob fat.

I also live in fear of the day that I’m actually asked what my opinion on plastic surgery is, because honestly, truly, I just don’t know. I should probably unpack this a bit more, because I care deeply about how I am perceived and have been very affected by the whole Ozempic-ification-of-everything thing recently. I think that being beautiful, or the aspirational idea of being beautiful (because what even is beautiful??), is ultimately impossible to achieve and therefore it’s the perfect play for a capitalist society of beings trapped in cycles of desire.

We exist in a culture of self-worship, an example of which is the subservience of others’ lifeless bodies to our simultaneous vanities and insecurities. Animals, technology, life and death become play things for our universe, that is, ourselves. Maybe it’s always been this way, particularly in the west, we’ve been exploiting others’ bodies to our own gain for centuries, and now we’re just expanding our field. It’s bleak.

Anyway, these are my thoughts for today. I might try and write a short horror story about a fat transfer gone wrong, or some kind of self-cannibalism GLP-1 nightmare thing. I will probably just watch a true crime doc and fall asleep.

Byeeee xxx

The sun has come out in London and I’ve gone a bit feral. Yesterday evening on the Regent’s Canal walk, I side-stepped grunting men and hordes of run clubbers while trying to look at a pair of Egyptian geese. I thought it was pretty cool that some birds native to Africa had found themselves in Angel, Islington but my boyfriend – a keen birdwatcher – assured me that they are actually really common. Whatever. It made my night regardless.

I can feel my annual spring motivation brewing. I need to keep it in check, else I begin setting myself the unachievable and ultimately disappointing goals that I usually do, such as: reach 10,000 Instagram followers by August/ get a six pack in six weeks/ ‘reconnect with my body’. This morning, my YouTube astrologist told me to prioritise my own enjoyment, and the rest will follow.

I’ve been moaning about London a lot recently, but I had a brief flash of affection yesterday whilst jogging through Victoria Park. There are lots of green spaces to replenish your soul and nature intake here. Obviously a book and a pastry on Hampstead Heath is the best, but other favourites include: parakeet spotting in Kew Gardens/ turtle watching in Mile End Park/ spontaneously joining miscellaneous races in Battersea. Boyfriend also wants to take me to somewhere promisingly named Paradise Fields, which is the home of the first beavers born in London in 400 years. So cool! I want to see beavers!

Going Outside

- I spent my Saturday in the V&A’s Schiaparelli show, trying to pick which item I’d steal if I had the chance. The answer is a Jean Cocteau designed embroidered jacket, with golden sequin locks cascading down one arm. I generally prefer a goth palette, but I came away with a new appreciation for the sexiness of eccentricity.

- The ‘Spanish Caravaggio’ Zurbarán exhibition (his first in the UK) opens at the National Gallery on 02 May. All Ottessa-era sad girl writers should visit… one of his masterpieces, Agnus Dei (1640), is on the cover of Lapvona.

- Also opening next week: Genuine Fake Premium Economy at the ICA, with work by Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory. The show explores the tension between art and money/ art as investment and luxury object. Like, everything I’m interested in and also triggered by. Preview is 30 April.

- I’m really intrigued by a karaoke club which has started popping up on my Instagram timeline. Their last event was on Friday and featured a ‘BIEBERCHELLA’ room, as well as ‘Charli’s Called It: The Dancefloor is Dead – Long Live the Moshpit’ and ‘963hz God Frequency’ spaces. So good. Not sure I could sing in front of all the sexy people on their Instagram, though.

- Last month I went to the first launch event of draught journal, a new publication from the RCA’s Writing MA (but also featuring external contributors like Daisy Lafarge, Brian Dillon and So Mayer) – it was really good. The next issue launches at Thomas Dane Gallery on Thursday.

- McKenzie Wark is doing a May tour and will be in London on the 16^th, Oxford on the 18^th. Whereabouts tbc.

- On 28 May at the Freud Museum and 29 May at the Courtauld, the Courtauld Institute MA Curating programme are staging a two-day conference on the Surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington, whose reassembled notebooks and painting Down Below are on view by Finchley Road. Magic for just £15 <3

Media Diet

- Let’s start with . Last Sunday I met the girls for a bloody mary at the Spurstowe and then waddled over to the Hackney Empire to see Lena curled up in bed with Dolly Alderton. Lena is a genius and I recommend Famesick very much… next on my spring Substack reading list is ’s Yesteryear, which Emily tells me is very, very good.

- On the 9 May, Deeper Into Movies is screening Grey Gardens at the Haggerston. It’s a doc about mother and daughter “high-society dropouts”, and the cousins of Jackie Onassis, who live in a ramshackle East Hampton mansion. Reaaaally wish I could go. Might watch it tonight.

Parting Thoughts

- My words are too powerful. A day after drunkenly telling an influencer I was “jealous” of her hate comments because it meant she’d “made it”, I had my first (minor) taste of Instagram embarrassment. And promptly crashed out for >24 hours.

જ⁀➴

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A bonus if you’ve made it this far: I’m starting a new interview series, which asks women I admire how they balance their creativity and commerciality to cultivate a fulfilling life. I guess (I’m hoping) it’ll be a cross between career guidance and wellness/spirituality content. Coming soooon xxxx

Talking of writing, and of media, I spent part of the previous week strategising video content for my upcoming Venice debut. I loved it… seven hours glued to my laptop mastering Premiere Pro reminded me of the FUN of LEARNING and scratched a newly discovered tech-nerd part of my brain. One thing I do have to admit is that filming direct-to-camera on the canal walk while fielding the glares of superior East London joggers is a lesson in humility. Overall, however, I feel ready– and willing– to become an influencer (a serious journalist).

Going Outside

• On the subject of Venice – obsessed with the Holy See (Vatican) Pavilion’s lineup of ‘sonic prayers’ by FKA Twigs, Patti Smith and Brian Eno. Find me in vernissage week beneath the trees of the The Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelite, thinking about my queen Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the 12^th century saint and pioneer of botanical healing, music, proto-surrealist prose and mysticism.

• Last week I attended the launch party for the refurbished Contemporary Wardrobe, the leading archive of UK street fashion. Tucked behind Russell Square in the Horse Hospital, the collection is a candy store of over 20,000 garments acquired by its founder, the late stylist (of Hackers and Quadrophenia fame) Roger K. Burton. Sipping champagne and sifting through rails of punk-era Westwood, Michael Hochong’s hotpants and Sebastian Horsley’s paint-splattered blazers is the perfect Friday night activity, imo. At one point, I was informed that the fur I was fondling was a real leopard. Iconic! You too can play dress up by booking an appointment here.

• The Emalin world (East London) takeover continues, with the opening of a glossy Helmet Row space, the former territory of Modern Art, which has graduated from Old Street to St. James’s. New space, same crowd: a sea of goths sipping German beer beneath bright white overheads.

• I like to balance my love/hate relationship with contemporary art with the occasional new lesson in art history. Hence a trip to the RA, to see the Michaelina Wautier show, the underappreciated 17^th century artist’s first UK exhibition. A reminder that all of the Google searches in the world can’t buy you hard-earned connoisseurship (another thing to feel inferior about).

• More recent gallery hopping has taken me to Carrie Mae Weems’s beautiful solo show at Goodman Gallery. Try looking at her haunting seascapes to the soundtrack of Yusef Lateef’s Like It Is and not be moved. I also popped into TINA, where I was attacked by a sensory onslaught of Johanna Hedva’s video works. Slightly overwhelming, nonetheless great.

Media Diet

• Devoured Zoe Dubno’s ‘looksmaxxing for women’ article in The Cut. Essential reading for anyone remotely interested in consumerism/ beauty standards/ online discourse rn.

• Researching (doomscrolling ) the other day, I came across the first (and last) fashion biennale, organised by Germano Celant, Luigi Settembrini and the inimitable Ingrid Sischy in Florence thirty years ago. I can’t get over the collaborations, which resulted in joint presentations/ pavilions. They included: Jenny Holzer & Helmut Lang, Damien Hirst & Miuccia Prada, Julian Schnabel & Azzedine Alaïa, and more. What a great idea, I want to steal it and revitalise it.

• My reading list continues to be dominated by Americana. Devouring Joyce Carol Oates’s creepy short stories post-We Were the Mulvaneys, with a side of Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer perversion. Also listening to the PRIVATE LIFE interview with JCO, in which she discusses Joan Didion, true crime as pop culture, and writing murderers. PERFECT!

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Wearing

• Nothing interesting, because I’ve decided my wardrobe is BORING and CHILDISH. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to make trouser-suits for women under 5’7, despite the average female height in the UK being 5’3 (making me half an inch taller than average, btw). I spent four hours in Soho hell yesterday afternoon looking for a nice lil vintage YSL or Armani set and found NOTHING which did not drown me. Hmph.

Parting Thoughts

• I saw Nigella at the River Café last week. She looked like Monica Bellucci. I fell in love as she shovelled a forkful of pappardelle into her mouth.

• Will purchasing an Oura ring make me more or less neurotic?

• Where are the good men?

Show Notes is a weekly (!!) newsletter offering commentary (with a side of scene reporting) on everything I did/ read/ overheard in art and fashion.

Last week, I eavesdropped on a conversation about wellness and beauty– specifically, the differences (if any) between the two. One party insisted on the terms’ distinctness, both in understanding and spending habits. The other acknowledged the increasing entwinement of the words, alongside their respective industries.

I tend to agree with the latter. Beauty is no longer confined to aesthetics; these days, it is embroiled in longevity, morality, ideology, purity, etc. And wellness, well… health no longer means being free of disease (reactive), but also individually optimised (preventative and proactive). This is the crux of the modern wellness/beauty complex: individual self-improvement.

I write this from a tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean, devoid of late night shopping and mobile data signals, where I am waking up early and going for beachfront runs and falling asleep to the words of Joyce Carol Oates in a pure, blissful light. I feel very lucky to be here – a privilege which not everybody has. The simple and profound nourishment of azure skies, interpersonal connection and time for rest has invited reflections on the way I incorporate wellbeing into my daily life.

It is easy to get swept up in the capitalistic conception of wellbeing in London, which is haunted by a grey, damp melancholy at odds with its relentless grindset. There is so much competition and so little time… it is no surprise that biohacking presents a tempting shortcut to success (although of course, self-optimisation is not unique to the urban environment).

This isn’t all bad. As the health queen Lily Sperry recently wrote, women have always been primed for ritual, and “in an era of uninspiring architecture and relentless tech-bro optimization, prioritizing beauty in all areas is certainly not a narcissistic pursuit”. (This is what I tell myself as my quarterly bleach appointment/ savings purge comes around).

BUT – perhaps we should remind ourselves that, while beauty and wellness become more confused, true wellbeing is so much more than just beauty. No amount of black market injection pens, vibration plates or baby Botox will cure your sorrows.

Contemporary western society is built on the foundations of anxiety and insufficiency… the antithesis, therefore, can be found in that which is delightfully simple. Such as: female friendships, books remembered long after the last page, sunlight, regular bowel movements, guilt-free exercise, peace of mind, spiritual and intellectual fulfilment.

Going Outside

• I travelled a lot in March: from the French Alps to Caribbean sands via a short stint in Maastricht, the majority of which I spent shivering in a soulless hotel room with food-poisoning. I did, however, make it out for long enough to run a quick round of TEFAF, the last of Europe’s grand old art and antiques fairs. My highlights included (from left to right): a portrait of Isabella Ruini in delectable lace and jewels by Lavinia Fontana, c.1592; a 1957 Dalí gold-and-enamel spoon/watch/comb; a Greek Attic marble Stele with a rare depiction of a Parthenos, an unmarried young woman, from the 4^th to 3^rd century BC.

Media Diet

• Besides my illness-induced rediscovery of SLOMW, I’ve barely watched any TV or movies this month. Instead, I read BOOKS. First up, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I’ve been haunted by Woolf-adjacent bad luck recently: at The Royal Ballet’s Woolf Works adaptation in February I couldn’t see anything and left in the interval; this month I just couldn’t get into The Waves, despite really, really wanting to love it. By the time I gathered the mental capacity to fully engage, I was at the final chapter (amazing, btw). Will read again in future.

• Read Lost Lambs in four-ish hours on my flight to Nassau. Easy, enjoyable read. I’m partial to conspiracy theories and the perversities of religion, so that was good. But look, like so much writing these days (inc. my own) many a new book is plagued by attention economy-syndrome: a fast pace resulting in the story ending just as you begin to resonate with the characters. It’s impossible to FEEL anything for a character you barely know, let alone an entire family of five crammed into 300 pages.

• Final holiday read was Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys. I am obsessed with Joyce Carol Oates. I wanted to write a fictionalised celebrity biography until I discovered Blonde had already mastered the form; I wanted to write an essay on true crime until I listened to Alissa Bennett’s rendition of Oates’s ‘The Mystery of JonBenét Ransey’ on the Private Life podcast. We Were the Mulvaneys was similarly right up my street: post-war Americana, the fragmentation of families, gendered violence, etc.

• New art world essay du jour is Josh Kline’s ‘New York Real Estate and the Ruin of Contemporary Art’ in October. Read in the midst of jet lag sleep deprivation, but hit just as hard. This is ostensibly about the negative implications of NYC and LA real estate on contemporary arts, but is really about the effects of post-2008 and post-pandemic American macroeconomics. Essential reading. Would be interesting to transpose to the UK (I imagine the outlook would be pretty similar).

Wearing

• Evidence that I was bronde for the week. Though I immediately noticed a dearth of catcalling and stares at my new Unspectacular and Natural hair colour, I felt that this reflected my new mid-twenties maturity (ish). To my surprise, I liked it! Unfortunately, as soon as the sun came out, my hair went straight back to white. Oh well, guess I’ll have to have fun for a little longer.

Parting Thoughts

• I leave this month with a simple but difficult resolution for an impatient, workaholic, anxious etc. girl like me: to incorporate intentional moments of slowness into the everyday. The other day I prepared for a nerve wracking meeting with fifteen minutes on the Shakti mat and a Palo Santo energy cleanse. I didn’t cry for an entire afternoon! Someone also just told me about the Russian ritual of “sitting for the road”, where travellers sit in silence for two minutes prior to setting off. It is rooted in a Pagan tradition to appease the ‘household spirit’ and ensure a safe journey, but also allows for a moment of quiet reflection before embracing movement and transformation. Love.

• Artemis II launched not far from where I was staying in the Bahamas and prompted a variety of existential questions, inc. would you be an astronaut if you were offered the opportunity? Is extraterrestrial life real? Will there be an art scene on Mars? Etc. Alien short story coming soon.

Hopefully back to my regular exhibition schedule/ prolific internet consumption next month! 💌

In other news, my March Show Notes will be late this month, because I’m going ON HOLIDAY. I also just don’t have much to say, except that I spent almost the entirety of my time in Maastricht for TEFAF in bed with food poisoning, and I’ve been drinking far too much. Anyways, enjoy!

DEEP MIND ANGEL MANIFESTATION. 𐦍

I am waiting for an angel to tell me that my life is about to start. The hotel room I am in has a palm leaf headboard and a bible on the bedside table. I am listening to the hypnotist’s voice, which floods the tangled wires of my headphones like clonazepam to a nerve, or the pull of melatonin into deep, wakeless sleep. I have hit the mania of exhaustion. I have raised my vibrations; I am actually vibrating. I feel as though I could smoke ten cigarettes and then run a marathon and collapse into one of the dive bars on the strip to smoke ten more.

Close your eyes, the hypnotist tells me. She is a founding member of the Divine Feminine School of Hypnosis, her speciality is deep mind wishing and positive manifestation. She tells me that I need to make love to my subconscious mind to reach somatic nirvana. She tells me that my mind, body and spirit are mycelial, that I am utterly connected to myself.

She tells me that I am at the gates of an angel visitation, that soon I shall be irrevocably altered. I close my eyes.

Over the next few days, I wait patiently. I am drinking margaritas on Ocean Drive and wondering if the waiter dragging spindly legs behind a torso bloated with steroids is my guardian angel. Maybe it is the man who wants to show me the full moon on the beach one night. It could be the waxy avatar on the greasy screen in the back of my supersized Uber, asking if I want a holiday itinerary personalised to my Zodiac sign.

In a lecture, I once learnt the tale of Genesis, in which the horny winged sons of god spawned earthly wickedness through their forbidden trysts with human women. Women are nuns, men are angels.

I sit on toilets and scroll. What form do modern angels take? Aliens are fallen angels, the 21^st century Nephilim are sentient AI, the ads on my phone are planted by Satan’s offspring, the sworn enemy: the devils.

In the seafront Starbucks, I can’t decide between the Lavender Cream Chai or the Ube Coconut Macchiato. The leathery woman ahead of me, her eyes the colour of a cloudless sky, tells me that the Ube will cure all of my sorrows. My order number is a triple three. The hypnotist calls upon Archangel Jophiel to send me three tenets of beauty: beautiful thoughts, a beautiful soul, eternal youth.

“Would you still fancy me if I got lip fillers?” I text my boyfriend from the cavernous exhibition hall. I feel very plain here. I queue to see the coin-sized Frida Kahlo self-portrait in its glass case and find its quiet poise deeply moving.

In January, a block of luxury condos inspired by the artist will go up for sale not far away. In the colossal mural of her face emblazoned on the side of the high-rise, she looks uncomfortable– imprisoned forever in a city whose manospheric eccentricism and vulgarity is at odds with her anti-capitalism.

There are no angels in luxury apartments or bulletproof glass boxes. There are no material angels, just the in-betweens, the liminality bridging materiality to transcendence.

I spend another second with Frida’s face-in-miniature. The painting itself is not an angel, I realise– the magic once imbued to its subject’s wistful stare by its artist’s third hand is, as well as the smile I share with the woman who stands next to me as we peer closely at its surface. Angels are the shimmer of light in the flecks of dust which blur my vision for a millisecond.

I am on the plane taking me home from my technicolour dreamscape to London. The psychoanalyst with the soft, gravelly voice chants Jungian synchronicities while I take flight.

“To this day”, the psychoanalyst quotes, “God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or worse”.

I think to myself, there are angels surrounding me, and I close my eyes.

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