Tending
Lots of updates and new work published!
Hello everyone,
I hope you’re keeping well. I thought I’d share some updates with you in case you don’t keep up with social media, or would like to revisit things in one place!
Buckle up, it’s a long one. I hope there’s something you enjoy below,
Eden
Things from me you may have missed!
I’m in the thick of editing what I hope will become my debut collection of experimental prose / life-writing! I’m snow-blind at the moment, but here’s what I wrote for a recent development application:
I’m planning to work on a project which brings together personal scraps, fragments and notes on the joyful, desperate and, at times, unhinged experience of my time dating in London.
This writing began two years ago when I started keeping a stream of consciousness document entitled ‘may is gonna be a sexy month’.
Paragraphs on the IUS coil, ChildSafe locks on Virgin Media and a dire attempt at a one night stand transpired. As in life, things modulated and it soon became apparent that certain experiences were going to be sharper than the comedy I had signed up for: the confronting, and often conflicting, reality of engaging with men in a culture where they are taught to expel their vulnerability couldn’t be avoided if I actually wanted to engage in a relationship with them.
Covering a period of around five months, the writing makes for an interesting assessment on a period of rapid self discovery. Even maintaining a single document became impossible and the writing from that time became strewn across countless Google Docs I am still in the process of piecing together. My aim is to glean the best bits and weave them into a larger narrative where each fragmentary piece interconnects, taking inspiration from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. Tonally, I adore Virgine Despentes, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. What I will need the most support with is successfully navigating emotional shifts across the collection, holding lust, rejection, euphoria and desperation together.
I’ve got another piece of work published in Land Ahead!
'becomings' is a photo essay that came about last year when the allure of makeup, queer culture and adornment carried me through a trickier spell. Working in an arts centre, I was surrounded by people who took the beauty of fashion to London's extreme and a small part of it rubbed off on me.
The work serves more as a question, really. I hope I can return to these themes more fully when I have more breathing room. You can see the essay on my Instagram.
Emily and I have begun MEDUSA again. Historically a feminist arts project, most recently we’ve been delving into cultural criticism on Substack. We most recently discussed the pitfalls of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” and are now turning our attention to editing a collection of unpublished work on dissatisfaction, ideated in 2022.
I went to Copenhagen in March. It charmed me and I did start to dream up ways of living there. If you’re ever in the city, try and get yourself to a public sauna and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Having been a fan of their YouTube channel for a while, I wasn’t disappointed by their fresh approach to curation and collecting. So many Global Majority artists, particularly from Central and South America which is direly lacking in my experience of London collections.
I’ve been learning more about the recently reopened Campsfield House.
Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) are designed to house people prior to their removal from the country but in reality they are a bottle neck in a broken, and underfunded, system. Folks end up incarcerated for long periods of time and then released back into the community when the grounds for their imprisonment are rightfully challenged. For example, in 2021, 86% of people leaving detention were released on bail — so, not deported — and most made successful claims to asylum or other forms of humanitarian protection, rendering their detention wholly unnecessary.
Because immigration detention is an administrative process, people can be detained without trial, without warning, and without proper judicial oversight. The UK remains the only country in Europe without a statutory time limit on immigration detention. The campaign needs all the help it can get so if you’re interested in supporting, there are some actions on the Close Campsfield website.
I’m changing jobs (again!), for the sake of my practice and a pension and a liveable wage to push my life along, I’m moving back into one of those strategic jobs where no one outside of the work is entirely sure what it is you do. Supporting and communicating large-scale digital transformation for one of the world’s most complexly organised universities, essentially. I’m looking forward to being stretched in a team after a couple of years of self-directed work.
I have mixed feelings and maybe a little bit of apathy about my time working in the arts. On a personal level, I’ve been exposed to so much amazing art. It’s completely changed my perception of what art can be, and how you can embed a serious practice into your life. But, structurally, it’s felt like a fact-finding mission rather than an opportunity to really shine. The most interesting jobs, split into curation and programming, are typically less accessible. You can 100% get into them at a later stage — e.g., I’d now be very well placed to apply for entry-level positions or pursue specific curatorial/literary research, understanding how the systems work — but they are unforgiving of the wage progression and contract stability that most (single) first-generation graduates need in their careers as they get closer to 30.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve opted to go along the administrative services route and pursue my practice alongside it, for the time being. Staying in the arts isn’t a risk I can, or want to, take right now. I need some solid foundations! Perhaps in five years the balance will be different again.
And yet, if you would have told 20 year old me I’d work in three very respected arts institutions back to back, I don’t think I’d have believed you. A decade on from first engaging with ‘art’, I know a hell of a lot more, have a long list of contacts and an awareness of funding bodies that one day I’ll be brave enough and ready to use. To be sustainable it’s slow progress, but it all feeds back, eventually.
Here are some highlights from those jobs!
Think that’s all for now. Looking forward to what’s next (and always happy to answer career questions, if helpful). We’re just getting started! Always takes bloody ages when you have got big dreams doesn’t it.
See ya!
Eden