Guest artist HELEN JOHNSON joins JILLIAN KNIPE for this final episode of Series 5, to discuss her work via 'The Birds' by Tarjei Vesaas. Published originally in 1957, then by Penguin Random House in 2019, this short novel describes the relationship between Hege and her younger, mentally challenged brother Mattis. With a sense of non-judgemental simplicity and acute sensitivity, we join the siblings as they negotiate everyday life in partial isolation and on the edge of something...

Guest artist ELEONORA AGOSTINI joins PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her art practice via 'Boxes', a short story featured in 'Elephant and Other Stories' 1998 Collins Harvill. Written by Raymond Carver and originally published in The New Yorker, the story explores connections, disillusion, powerlessness, worry and loss within a mother and son relationship, as well as the distance between listening and hearing.  ELEONORA and Pelumi's discussion encompasses immortality, microcosmos, waitressing,...

Guest artist MELANIE JACKSON joins artist JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art practice via 'Corey Fah Does Social Mobility' by Isabel Waidner. Published in 2023 by Hamish Hamilton, part of Penguin Random House, the novel explores binaries, boundaries and borders, freeing us to imagine other ways of being within the context of award winning social mobility, cyclical history, and watching reality TV.  MELANIE and Jillian's discussion encompasses shame, humility, apology, gratitude, wormholes,...

Guest writer and filmmaker JULIET JACQUES joins artist and writer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her creative practice via 'Variations' 2021 by the one and only Juliet herself. Published in 2021 by Influx Press, this book of short stories portrays the mixed, messy and moving lives of transexual women transexual men, non binary, gender queer, cross dressers and inverts, around London, Manchester, Liverpool, Blackpool, Brighton, Belfast, Cardiff and Norwich.   Juliet and Jillian focus on 'Standards...

Guest artist ANNA CLEGG joins curator and critic VANESSA MURRELL to discuss her multi-disciplinary art practice via 'My Loose Thread' by Denis Cooper. Published in 2002 by Canongate Books, this claustrophobic novel circulates around teenage Larry who is wrestling with the point of his own existence and explores teen depression, moral vacuity and the confusion of love.   Please be warned that in following the content of Cooper's text, the programme contains references to violence and...

Guest artist OLUKEMI LIJADU joins curator and PHD researcher PELUMI ODUBANJO  to discuss her multi-media art practice through the prism of 'The Stranger' (aka 'The Outsider' aka 'The Foreigner') by Nobel Prize winning writer Albert Camus. Published in 1942, the novella tells of an indifferent French settler who, soon after his mother's funeral, commits the senseless murder of an unnamed Arab man on a Algerian beach. Heralded in the west as a classic text which explores the absurd, their...

Guest artist RORY PILGRIM joins author and critic ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss his musically inspired, community-based art practice through the prism of 'The Bell' by Irish British writer and philosopher, Dame Jean Iris Murdoch. Published in 1958, this funny and sad novel explores religion, human frailty and who has the right to a voice, set within the confines of a lay community. Please be warned that in following the content of Murdoch's text, the programme contains references to sexual...

Guest artist ANNA BARHAM joins artist JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art practice via 'Companion Piece' by Ali Smith. Published in 2023 by Penguin Books, the novel explores language, meaning, relationships and contemporary politics in what may be seen as a way of bringing a form of conclusion to Smith's urgently written then quickly published, seasonal texts: Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring. ANNA and Jillian's discussion encompasses disfluencies, purity, transcription software, unfolding...

Guest artist MIKHAIL KARIKIS joins poet and art critic CHERRY SMYTH to discuss his art practice via 'Human Acts' by Han Kang, 2016 published by Granta Books. Set in 1980 South Korea, the novel tells the gruelling story of a violently suppressed student uprising and the inevitable fallout from the original trauma. MIKHAIL and CHERRY's discussion encompasses trust, courage, coalminers, eco-activism, protest and pearl-divers. As well as chance encounters, female superheroes, community...

Guest artist ROSIE GIBBENS joins VANESSA MURRELL of DATEAGLE to discuss her art practice via 'Life Ceremony' by Sayaka Murata, 2022 published by Granta Books. This off-kilter collection of short stories brings a grotesque whimsy to fables of cultural norms, including society rituals that develop when the human species is endangered .    ROSIE and VANESSA's discussion encompasses ritual, nothingness, meatarianism, shit and vomit . As well as ribcage tables, mocking Freud, recycling flesh,...

Guest artist mentor CERI HAND joins artist and writer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her creative practice via 'The Blazing World' 2014 by Siri Hustvedt and published by Hodder & Stoughton. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, it tells tales of the life of artist Harriet Burden. Presented across snapshots of journal entries and testimonies by her family, friends and colleagues, the accounts are compiled and edited by academic researcher...

Guest artist SUSAN SCHUPPLI joins art critic and author ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her art practice via 'The Second Body' 2017 by Daisy Hildyard, published by Fitzcarraldo Books. Listed by the 'White Review' on their Books of the Year 2018, the essay presents the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, with an updated dualism between the animal bodies in which we eat, breathe, and sleep and the virtual bodies of our global connections and environmental impacts. Susan and...

Guest artist SOPHIE RUIGROK joins VANESSA MURRELL of DATEAGLE to discuss her art practice via 'Nobody Belongs Here More Than You' 2007 by Miranda July, published by Canongate Books. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, it conveys 16 stories of lonely characters desperately trying to make connections. Their means vary from quirky to the absurd and mostly only result in the disillusion of coinciding in the same space.  Sophie and Vanessa talk about escape, clouds,...

Guest artist NICOLA BEALING joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Pastoralia' 2020 by George Saunders. Published Riverhead Books, the book contains six short stories each presenting snapshots of contemporary American existence delivered in a deadpan, razorsharp tone, and enshrouded with dark humour. We talk about dark humour, executions, internal panic, male strippers, 18th century working class fabrics, Goya being God, cruelty, Stasi prison, cave people, hazardous shitholes, bum...

Guest artist FLORENCE PEAKE joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her multi-faceted, performance-led art practice via 'Stone Butch Blues' 1993 by Leslie Feinberg. It tells the story of life as a butch lesbian in 1970s, working class America and is particularly unique due to the writer gaining full rights to the text, making it fully accessible online and for free. Florence and Elizabeth talk about hysterical clay, collapsing paintings, mark-making without sight, rigid heteronormative...

Guest author JENNIFER HIGGIE joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art writing practice via 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' by Olga Tokarczuk. It's a compelling murder mystery set in a small mountainside village in Poland. As Winter caretaker of neighbouring properties, Janina spends her spare time translating the poems of William Blake into Polish with her friend and ex-student Dizzy.  We talk about how women found agency within the rise of spiritualism, telephoning the dead, art...

Guest artist KATIE PRATT joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Once in Europa' 1987 by John Berger. As part of the 'Into Our Labours' trilogy, the novel is set in an alpine village and describes grounded charm and limiting isolation against the encroaching industrialisation of urban life.   We talk about the disorganised surface, organic and geometric, the French Alps, industrial revolution, the mass of strike actions across UK industries right now (and for good reason), a certain lack...

Guest artist ANNA PERACH  joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her work via 'The Victorian Chaise Longue' 1953 by Marghanita Laski. The novel describes the experience of a charming yet childish lawyer's wife who wakes up in the body of her alter-ego eighty years previously. It's a chilling tale of entrapment, which closely links to Anna's sculptural work as she reacts to female stereotypes, trapped in their societal roles, trapped in her tufted wool costumes.    ANNA...

Guest artist PAOLA BALLA joins Jillian Knipe for this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Paola and I discuss colonisation in a place widely known as Australia, and its corresponding cost to herself, her family and her extensively long ancestral lineage, via poet Ellen van Neerven's 'Comfort Food' published in 2016. We...

Guest artist INGRID BERTHON-MOINE joins Elizabeth Fullerton for this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  Ingrid and Elizabeth discuss the absurdity of male domination within cultural identity via film maker Virginie Despentes' novel 'Kong Kong Theory' published in French in 2006 and English 2010. A mix of memoir,...

Guest artist RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE joins Jillian Knipe for this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Richard and I discuss his disjointed cultural story, via Amos Tutuola's second novel 'The Bush of Ghosts', published in 1954. We follow a young boy, separated from his mother and brother, into a forbidden place of...

Guest artist NIKA NEELOVA  joins Jillian Knipe on this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Nika and I discuss the flow of her cultural story, via poet Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge', first published in 1910. We follow Brigge into the depths of the down and out cityscape as he...

Welcome and Welcome Back to this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange will run until the end of March 2022. Elizabeth Fullerton and Jillian Knipe will discuss the artistic practices of our guests in the usual way - through the prism of their selected piece of fiction - though, for CULTURE...

Guest artist HOLLY HENDRY joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to chat about her work via Tom McCarthy's 2005 novel 'Remainder' in which the nameless narrator must re-learn body movements after a debilitating accident. He (we assume) is awarded a ridiculous sum in compensation which he uses to re-enact past happenings in microscopic detail, increasingly absurd and violent in nature. Holly is a lot more pleasant. However, she is also compelled to open up the surface of objects to discover what's...