by Holly Grange
‘Let us move on. Let's take a few breaths of fresher air. Let's start with the belief, hope, wish, that mutual love is possible.’ (RD Laing, 1989)
BIG LOVE arrived at just the right moment, welcoming the Leeds arts scene into its tender embrace. On Valentine’s Day, it opened its joyful and unapologetically exhibitionistic arms at Hyde Park Art Club (HPAC). Curated by artist George Storm Fletcher as a ‘love-letter to artists’, and to artists’ countless and manifold loves, it also served as a fascinating exploration of love in all its messy, slippery forms. Intentional or not, the exhibition became something of a Valentine to the artistic community of Leeds, Fletcher's chosen home city, with two-thirds of the selected artists living and working there.
If BIG LOVE has a manifesto, it can be found in Fletcher's open call, which requested ‘heart on sleeve, honest (embarrassing even) works’, ‘naïve artworks’ and ‘impulsive gestures’. Revealingly, insisting during their public talk with Benedetta D’Ettorre, co-director of HPAC, that this is ‘not a show about who has exhibited where, or a show requiring long sentences of justification about how an artwork is relevant to the brief or interesting.’ It feels like a refreshing tonic in an art world often fuelled by prestige, professionalisation and carefully honed statements. The rebelliousness of Fletcher’s curatorial approach will come as no surprise to those familiar with their artistic practice. A self-described ‘artist menace’, they have built a body of work that is queer, playful, emotionally open and resistant to contemporary art's more cynical tendencies.
Fletcher's call-out reads less like a curatorial framework than a challenge: what would happen if we took devotion, obsession, admiration and tenderness seriously? What kinds of artworks emerge when artists are invited to be earnest rather than ironic?
The generosity of this premise is made manifest in a broad-ranging and unruly group of selected works by 30 artists. Rather than following a conventional hang, the exhibition spreads across the walls and surfaces of the Art Club and bar like a mycelial web, connecting disparate works through proximity and association. To my relief, BIG LOVE does not attempt to present love as a singular romantic ideal. Love appears here as friendship, fandom, obsession, faith, care, longing, grief, admiration and collective belonging. Love runs throughout the exhibition as connective tissue: in acts of identification and sustained contemplation, in gestures of bodily intimacy and desire. It emerges not only as a subject, but as a method: a way of making art, looking at art and relating to others.
But how to write about such a show? There is certainly a love in critique, I believe, and in the attentiveness this requires. Love is not opposed to theory, thought or critique, as certain modes of thinking might suggest, casting the critic/writer as a dry or detached individual. Rather, love enables a particular kind of knowledge. We come to know the things we love, and we come to know them differently from the things we do not love.
So rather than attempting a comprehensive, and impossible, survey, I want to take this as an opportunity to give sustained attention to a handful of works that have stayed with me since visiting the exhibition. I would also urge readers to seek out the accompanying book, featuring all 30 exhibiting artists alongside a further 50 contributors.
We start with Jill McKnight's Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards But Must Be Lived Forward, a title borrowed from a line in the 1843 diaries of Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. In essence, we can only fully grasp the significance of events, relationships, decisions and their consequences in retrospect, even though we have no choice but to blunder our way forward through life without the benefit of that hindsight or the ability to edit the script retroactively. Perhaps art-making provides a way of negotiating these injustices? McKnight’s diminutive oil pastel sketch occupies a special place within the exhibition's origin story. Fletcher spoke about first encountering this double portrait of partners in life and art, Jill McKnight and Joshua Hart, surrounded by their menagerie of animal companions, tucked discreetly in a solo exhibition. Like a votive offering, the work became the catalyst for BIG LOVE itself.
Looking at it, I found myself wondering about the particular nature of artistic partnerships. What does it mean to share a life with someone who understands the compulsions, frustrations and peculiar rhythms of being an artist? The history of art is full of artist couples, from Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely to Marina Abramović and Ulay, whose relationships blurred the boundaries between collaboration and individuality. McKnight's work does not offer grand statements about this condition; rather, it suggests two creative lives unfolding alongside one another, occasionally intersecting, while each retains its own trajectory. Love is found here not in spectacle or transcendence, but in companionship, reciprocal support and the accumulation of ordinary intimacies.
Moving from McKnight's vision of companionship to the darker terrain of Eros, Ellen Burroughs' Odes series explores the uneasy territory where desire tips into obsession. Screen-printed in black ink on pink butcher's paper and steeped in a scent reminiscent of Calvin Klein's iconic Obsession perfume, the works take as their starting point a fragrance synonymous with erotic fixation. Burroughs recreated the perfume working from descriptions of its musky, amber-heavy composition rather than using the perfume itself, less interested in the scent than in how it survives in memory: distorted, embellished and transmuted over time. What remains is the fragrance’s afterimage, reconstructed through longing, cultural mythology and personal association. I have long been fascinated by the strange literary world of online fragrance forums such as Fragrantica, where perfume reviews read less like consumer guidance and more like miniature works of fiction. These repositories of longing, fantasy and projection feel ripe to me for artistic appropriation, and so I was excited to see Burroughs explorations into the olfactory.
The printed images in Odes possess the unsettling logic of dreams or tarot cards. A nude couple hang suspended on a love swing, inverted and conjoined like mating invertebrates. A hand drapes languorously across a reclining face. Ants swarm across bare skin. Elsewhere, what first appears to be a cascade of luxuriant hair is revealed to belong not to a human body, but to a horse, its face obscured beneath a waterfall-like mane. My one reservation is that the works demand a scale commensurate with their emotional intensity. I found myself imagining them enlarged and unfurled across the gallery in great draped swathes of scented paper, hanging from the ceiling like scrolls or banners, their heady aroma saturating the space and enveloping visitors in the atmosphere of seduction and unease that the images so effectively conjure.
Emerging from this feverish dream-state, I encounter pages pinned to the wall like confessional diary entries featuring a storyboard of painted horses. These are Islay Wolstenholme's works Horse Comics, where the central protagonist is a white horse called Buell, an avatar for the artist herself. The comic traces the aftermath of loss, anchored by the line, ‘What is grief if not love persevering?’ I found myself contemplating why this work struck me in the way it did. Perhaps these curious and sincere horse comics lodged with me because I encountered the exhibition in the aftermath of my own personal loss. As bell hooks reminds us, ‘love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief.’[1] BIG LOVE understands this intuitively. Its most compelling works recognise that love and loss are not opposites but companions, each revealing the contours of the other. Following the death of my sibling last year, these ideas have felt less like theory than lived reality. Grief has sharpened my awareness that love persists beyond presence.
There is an earnestness to Wolstenholme’s work and several others in the exhibition, and I mean that in no way as a criticism, but it is nevertheless a quality that is increasingly rare in contemporary culture. Horse Comic possesses something of the homemade stories, drawings, and cartoons we often make just before we transition into our teenage years: emotionally direct, slightly awkward, unconcerned with coolness. There is no attempt to disguise vulnerability beneath layers of sophistication. Instead, Wolstenholme allows grief to appear in all its raw and sometimes melodramatic dimensions, trusting that sincerity can carry the work. We live in a culture that largely continues to denigrate ‘girlish’ forms of attachment and expression, like fandom, romantic longing, emotional excess, diary-keeping, horse obsessions, crushes and heartbreak, often dismissed as frivolous or immature precisely because they are associated with young women and girls. Yet these are often the very experiences through which we first learn about desire, devotion, identity and loss.
Questions of value, belonging and social acceptance around expressions of love and desire resurface elsewhere in the exhibition. Connor Shields' contribution, a vinyl text piece, Bar Dykes and Promiscuous Gay Men, applied directly onto plywood, reproduces a passage from Gayle Rubin's landmark 1984 essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’. In it, Rubin describes the hierarchies of sexual value that structure society, observing that ‘stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid.’ Four decades later, the quote retains its sting, drawing attention to the ways desire continues to be organised through systems of legitimacy and exclusion.
Several works in BIG LOVE also point towards bonds of friendship and solidarity. Among the most affecting is Hannah Guy's photographic lightbox work Lady Beetle, which depicts two of the artist's friends in an ordinary domestic setting: one perched on a toilet seat, the other reclining in a bathtub. There is nothing spectacular about the scene, and therein lies precisely its power. The photograph attends to the quiet intimacies that exist between close friends: the ease of shared space, the comfort of being witnessed, the ability to be entirely oneself in another's presence. Guy has described the work as being about ‘the grounding presence of a friend that explains, stays, observes and laughs.’ Friendship is often overshadowed by the cultural prominence afforded to romantic and familial relationships. Yet Lady Beetle suggests that some of our most meaningful forms of love emerge through our chosen relationships with friends.
Friendship has been much on my mind recently as I research the forms of collectivising, mutual support and affective solidarity that emerged between artists in the North of England during the Thatcher years for my ongoing PhD on art from the North in the 1980s [2]. The parallels between then and now can feel striking. The artists I am researching were responding to deindustrialisation, mass unemployment, racism, homophobia and the systematic dismantling of public life. Today, many of those same fault lines remain. Yet we also face new battlefronts: deepening economic inequality, the resurgence of the far right, intensifying transphobia and Islamophobia, the climate crisis, and genocidal violence in Palestine unfolding in real time across our screens.
Recently, I have been reading Elif Sarican and Dilar Dirik on the revolutionary experiment in Rojava. Drawing on the Kurdish concept of hevaltî, they describe friendship not simply as a personal bond but as a form of comradeship rooted in collective care and mutual transformation. Against the fragmenting pressures of capitalism, they argue that solidarity requires more than simply working alongside one another. ‘If we are fighting together,’ they write, ‘we need to try and like, in fact, love each other, too.[3]’ That idea feels particularly resonant within the current cultural landscape. Against the forces that seek to isolate, divide and exhaust us, friendship offers a way of remaining connected to one another and to the possibility of collective life. At a time when artists are routinely encouraged to compete for shrinking opportunities and resources, friendship can begin to feel like a radical act. Behind every exhibition, publication and project lies a web of relationships and acts of generosity that rarely receive recognition. Friendship is not separate from cultural production; it is often what sustains it.
If BIG LOVE asks us to take love seriously, then perhaps it also asks us to take friendship seriously, not as a lesser relation, but as a practice of solidarity.
At this moment in time, Leeds is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere across the UK. Cultural institutions are shrinking and closing, and many queer and grassroots spaces face a similarly uncertain future. This is why venues such as Hyde Park Art Club and Book Club play an increasingly important role in the city’s cultural ecosystem, sustaining the networks, relationships and opportunities upon which artistic communities depend. More than simply another exhibition venue, HPAC operates as a curatorial collective committed to supporting Northern artists. Embedded within the social and cultural life of Hyde Park Book Club, it occupies a space that sits somewhere between gallery, social venue and community hub, providing a vital site of gathering, experimentation and queer joy. It is perhaps no surprise then that an exhibition centred on love should emerge from a space built around precisely these forms of care and collective belonging.
There is something altogether quite audacious and hopeful about conceiving of an exhibition around the theme of love at this time, especially as, across both the intimate scale of everyday life and the vast scale of global crisis, we are so often witnessing the failure to extend love towards our fellow humans and the more-than-human world. Being in love, or loving, feels like both an innately optimistic and yet a hugely vital practice at this current conjuncture. BIG LOVE presents love as something that must be practised rather than assumed: contingent, imperfect, occasionally ambivalent, but necessary nonetheless. The works gathered here might be understood as propositions for how to remain open to one another rather than paralysed by the state of perma-crisis in which we find ourselves, even when conditions seem so often to foreclose the possibility of connection. Our lives are fundamentally entangled with those of others and are all the better for it.
All images courtesy of George Storm Fletcher and Hannah Guy.
BIG LOVE at Hyde Park Art Club, Leeds, UK, ran from 14th February - 14th April 2026.
[1] hooks, b. (2000) All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins, p. 200.
[2] Further information about the research here.
[3] Performing Borders e-journal here.
(co-convened by Maria Fusco and Beth Hughes, Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, 10 April 2026)
review by Derek Horton
A recent report by Create London and Arts Emergency on inequalities in the creative industries identified that only 18% of people working in music, performing and visual arts come from a working-class background. As the barriers to entry get higher and the costs and debt burden of higher education get greater, that shamefully small proportion will only shrink still further.
Throughout a long career in the visual arts and university education I have always been conscious of my working-class origins. Consciously proud of them, determined to retain my regional accent and my connections to the working-class society that formed my values and interests, but conscious also that economically, culturally, and socially, I am more often than not surrounded by people who live in another world. As a straight, white man, my ‘otherness’ in this context is of course not magnified in the way that it is for so many, and my awareness of the intersectionality of disadvantage and exclusion has increased with the knowledge and experience that has accrued over many years.
“Class bites into everything we do in art and so the process of confronting it must be worked out among ourselves. To do this we will need to talk a lot more about class. And for this to be successful, the deaf ears to class cannot dominate the rooms and pages in which the question of class must be raised as a problem for art.”
So wrote Dave Beech, in his essay Talking in Class, in Art Monthly no. 489, September 2025. Happily there were absolutely no deaf ears to class at Who does not envy with us is against us: a conference on working-classness as method in creative practice, convened by Maria Fusco and Beth Hughes for the Working-class British Art Network at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in April 2026, not least because here, for once, working-class artists filled the room. That was pretty much a unique experience for me, and I know for many others in the room, and it made the day an emotional one.
The event’s brilliance lay in all the contributors’ ability to engage the audience with everything that is normally absent from academic conferences, everything customarily elided by theoretical perspectives and middle-class politesse. (As Maria Fusco succinctly put it, this conference was for those who have a sophisticated vocabulary but sometimes prefer to say 'fuck'!) The day was filled with an unusual degree of humour; sometimes bleak and self-deprecating, more often at the expense of the middle-class pretension and entitlement so pervasive in the art world. Unapologetic subjectivity usurped the often alienating detachment of academic objectivity that normally dominates academic presentations, as the invited contributors passionately shared their profoundly personal experiences in ways that clearly resonated with those of the audience. This mutually empathetic relationship between speakers and audience pervaded the day and played a big part in making it such a unique experience.
United by this as we were, the day was no simple assertion of class solidarity, rather a celebration of the diversity of working-class experience. Feminist and queer perspectives were foregrounded; a range of very different childhood and educational experiences were described; and the contributors worked within and across genres and media including painting, photography, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, writing, music, stand-up comedy and more.
This kind of positivity is easily and often undermined when we are confronted by the entitlement and sense of superiority that is prevalent in so many parts of the artworld in which we have to fight to find our place. It was encouraging to be reminded by Dave Beech at the end of the day that, rather than succumbing to working-class imposter syndrome, we would do well to recognise that what we really suffer from is the consequence of middle-class belonging syndrome.
The day didn’t pass without some reservations though. I was uncomfortable, as I often am at so many artworld events, at the whiteness of the room. The reasons are complex of course, and related to the very barriers to inclusion that were the subject of the conference, but with notably few exceptions (and interestingly nearly all of those were invited speakers), this was a gathering of the white working-class. It brought to mind an observation made by the photographer and writer Jonny Pitts at another Working-class British Art Network event recently, that when he’s invited to speak about class he’s often the only Black person present, and at events where he’s invited to speak about Blackness, he’s often the only working-class person in the room.
This was, rightly, and as I already said, joyfully, a celebratory event that completely punctured the myths inherent in middle-class stereotypes of working-class life, and as such was immensely valuable and all too rare, so I understand that no-one would have wanted to bring down the mood or, worse still, reinforce or contribute to negative stereotypes. But from my perspective, a significant elephant in the room was any considered critique of negative aspects of working-class culture. My working-class dad was by no means alone amongst his peers and workmates in his racist attitudes or in the fact that he voted Tory. And my working-class mom’s homophobia was not only upsetting but also seemed deeply at odds with her passionate pacifism. Regardless of the arguments, I loved my parents, and hold them dear in my memory. Their culture and values were not exceptional (as borne out by the success of Reform UK amongst working-class voters, or the millions of working-class Americans who helped elect Trump) but undeniably they reflected class alienation, economic and educational disadvantage, and susceptibility to popular media (mis)representations. My parents’ attitudes did not make me ashamed of my class, nor wish in any way to disown my origins, but they did make me angry, and still do. And so, while I remain proudly working-class, that anger was the beginning of a need to find a more tolerant milieu and a more nuanced attitude to my working-class allegiances. It has left me profoundly sceptical of any adherence to a kind of class exceptionalism or blindly sentimental assumptions about ‘working-class values’.
We badly need to celebrate working-class artists, to counter the crass stereotypes that still prevail in the middle-class art world, and to come together in joyous solidarity. We need to assert with pride that we’re here to stay and, as Michael Dean put it in his stirring talk, “we’re gan fucking nowhere!” This conference epitomised that spirit, and Maria Fusco, Beth Hughes, and every one of the speakers* deserve our immense gratitude for that. So, whilst accepting that this rare day of collective pride may not have been the occasion for it, if we are to fully acknowledge the intersectional complexities in our exclusion, and avoid romanticising working-classness, we might need to temper our celebration with a degree of introspection, and a self-critical approach to some of our own assumptions too.
* Full list of speakers:
Leanne Green, Maria Fusco, Hannah Perry, Paul Clinton, Damien O’Connell, Michael Dean, Julia Rosenstock, Jacqueline Donachie, Jessie Jones, Kelly O’Brien, Michelle Hannah, Marley Starskey Butler, Mike Pinnington, Bharti Parmar, Belinda Scarlett, Twayna Mayne, Caitlin Shepherd, Matthew Wayne Parkin, Deirdre O’Neill, Dani Child, Jade Bradford, Stuart Whipps, Adam Benmakhlouf, Dave Beech.
Images used with the permission of the conference convenors.
by Karen Whiteson
The shadowy quality of the work’s documentary vestiges will act as a memento to the missing body of the book. Printed as a statement of intent on the back cover of the sculptor Katrina Palmer’s book ‘End Matter’, this extract underlines that which the title suggests, i.e. this is a book constituted entirely of its own supplementary material. Whether or not the main corpus ever existed in the first place is one of several riddles which serve to baffle and fascinate the collective figure of the Loss Adjusters. A metaphysical version of the insurance agent who assesses the amount of compensation to be paid following a claim, the Adjusters’ main remit is to account for the loss of land mass from the isle of Portland, and attempt to counterbalance it with presence. The title of one their (missing)dossiers is ‘Compensating for the Depletion of Real Things with Fictionality’. Here, the idea of fiction as a hallucination arising out of emptiness is embedded the landscape. Portland stone supplies the building material for the bulk of London’s civic edifices; a million square feet was quarried for Saint Paul’s cathedral alone. The hollowing out of the bedrock renders it a site acutely vulnerable to fabulists. And, one might add, allegorists; at least going by Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that Allegory is in the realm of thought as ruins are in the realm of things.
According to Benjamin, the gaze, charged with a sense of transience, falls upon its object, hollowing it out of any meaning except that which it acquires through interpretation. For Benjamin the melancholic gaze is the essence of the allegorical mindset. Hence The Loss Adjusters are at all times woeful: an inherent disposition confirmed by their proximity to Portland stone. The allegorical emblem par excellence is the ruin; through its re-absorption into the landscape the built environment becomes memento mori. In allegory, Benjamin states, the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Only here, the ruin is not the crumbled edifice but a terrain hollowed out by the quarrymen and convicts; those who cut the stones which go to build the capital, leaving behind a negative space, an ancient landscape palpably charged with loss. The landscape as its own ruin and memorial in one: the ruin as readymade. At least, so it becomes as witnessed by the Loss Adjusters: What is not here is commemorated at the site of its disappearance. The entire island is a Portland stone memorial, carved out and immense, shaped by convicts and quarrymen, sliced and dissected by the machine, and perceived as an ongoing sculptural production created by loss.
In ‘End Matter’ missing bodies comprised of both text and flesh – dislodged stones and the sound of implements hitting rock – are some of recurring motifs embedded just under the surface of the narrative, where the threads of the story merge and loop to form a subterranean labyrinth. Dense with ideas, the book also delivers a rattling good yarn.
These tales are presented as deleted fragments, retrieved and pored over by the Adjusters; the work of a writer in residence who has herself gone awol. These fragments concern the quarryman’s two “deviant” daughters, a Carniter and his dealings with a Rogue Loss Adjuster and Ash, a young convict. The first tale features sisters Celestine and Hazeline, themselves supplementary creatures who having outlived their father’s traditional occupation of quarrying, have no place in the social structure. But here we are. As Celestine says. Displaced by time yet stubbornly present in space they’re like the mound of earth which appears when Ash buries the Rogue’s corpse. Their excessive love of the landscape binds them to the island. One day Hazeline recounts to her sister a peculiar encounter with the Adjusters. The encounter begins with them questioning her in the interests of their bureaucratic research, but this soon turns into a group sex scene described in terms of a machinic assembly of moving parts, a merging of flesh with stone. As Celestine wryly comments: There’s a long history of banging and cutting on this island. I hope they thanked you. The link between the sex scene and the exertion of labour required to extract the stone is continually evoked throughout the book, underlining its theme of sacrifice and expenditure.
This orgiastic scene triggers the event of a runaway horse whose mad dash across the island culminates in the dislodging of a huge boulder which crushes Hazeline’s hut, along with a human inhabitant of the island, (the identity of the crushed remains supplies one of several story hooks). The elemental force of the runaway horse is conjured in a singular sonic image: Its heavy hooves powered down and into the ground. Those hoofbeats sustain their echo in the recurring descriptions of men working stone: Co-ordinated sound resonated throughout the arena; the repeated impact of iron against rock. The power required for a human body to force a pickaxe through stone required this rhythm.
This book is part of a tripartite work commissioned by Artangel and these interlocking tales have been repurposed for an audio piece which accompanies a site specific walk, as well for a broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This juxtapositioning of the written with the spoken word is intrinsic to the dynamic tensions of ‘End Matter’. For Benjamin too, this tension was key to the liberating potential of allegory, which he saw as a space where: [W]ritten language and sound confront each other in tense polarity. The writer-in-residence leaves behind an audio file which records her speech and footsteps in real time; its immediacy mediated by the Adjusters bureaucratic method and presented as a forensic exhibit. Benjamin continues: The division between signifying written language and intoxicating spoken language opens up a gulf in the solid massif of verbal meaning and forces the gaze into the depth of language. This stratifying device is active both in terms of both ‘End Matter’s’ formatting and its narrative strategy, producing a text as compressed and richly layered as the geological formation of Portland stone. It evokes a vertical temporality, a coexistence of all the different eras inhabited by this slim book, ranging from the Jurassic to the contemporary. This vertical sense of time lends itself to a belief in reincarnation and the Adjusters suspicion the Rogue Adjuster has evolved into an inextinguishable life force is an irrational possibility which seeps out to encompass all the characters.
In Craig Owens’ essay ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’, he states: Allegory is an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a procedure. It occurs whenever one text is doubled by another. One text is read through another. The paradigm for the allegorical work is the palimpsest. In ‘End Matter’ the allegorical attitude is so intensified, it conjures the supersensible as Palmer calls it. In Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime novel ‘The Heat of the Day‘ there’s a phrase which evokes the atmosphere of collective hallucination of London during the blitz, which allows for fleeting moments of intense, erotically charged, telepathic communication between the characters. She calls it: the thinning of the membrane between this and that. The thinning of the membrane between this and that, bringing lost layers of duration into stark relief, is the latent force at work in ‘End Matter’.
In other story threads produced by the writer-in-residence, the allegorical attitude is played out in a way which highlights the absurd, Kafkaesque quality of its endeavour. Most strikingly, in the case of the Rogue Adjuster where the logic of absence counterbalanced by presence is enacted in terms of the law of supply and demand. As well as stone, the island also boasts sheep which yield a particularly sweet mutton and which the Rogue exports for profit. As the Loss Adjusters summarise the situation: The Rogue realises that an overlooked consequence of quarrying is the removal of grazing land for Portland’s native sheep. In his degenerate mind, he understands that this delicacy will become rare, so he attempts to secure a supply of it for himself, to fulfill an improbable level of demand from some unspecified market. Paradoxically, the Rogue needs the land to continue to disappear in order for the sheep to become increasingly valuable. At one point the Rogue, in his greed, is compared to a pig–whose meat he himself disdains on the grounds it will happily eat human flesh. His own corpse ends up being fed to these very animals, so embodying the self-consuming cycle of supply and demand which drives market forces. This aspect of ‘End Matters’ is a cautionary tale that turns on the thinning of the membrane between human and animal, between stone and flesh. As if, beneath the skin of the landscape, there stirs an endless chain of being.
An earlier version of this review was previously published by 3:AM Magazine.
End Matter by Katrina Palmer was published by BookWorks in 2015.
Works consulted:
Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998).
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949).
Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism', October, 12 (1980), pp. 67–86.
Katrina Palmer, (London: BookWorks, 2015).