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Thanks to Andrew's parents adding us to their Netflix account we've been catching up on recent films released on the platform, notably Glass Onion (dir. Rian Johnson, 2022) and The Wonder (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2022). The Knives Out films, as enjoyable as I find them, don't need any help from me. The Wonder , however, is a film I feel ought to research and write about, and it is that feeling moreso than the film itself that I'll share thoughts about for now. In 2016 while I was a fixed-term lecturer in film at Lancaster University I designed a project with which to apply for a Leverhulme early career fellowship in the hopes of getting myself a job remaining there and developing my career in a more solid direction. It was a study of contemporary transregional moving image production across Britain and Ireland. It would have been an expansion of my PhD research on these practices in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 out to and across the other smal

TW: sexual violence, rape The Minotaur (Damien Hirst, 2012, image from art.net) This depiction of the half-man, half-bull of Greek myth raping an Athenian virgin presents the violent threat of unfettered male sexuality. Greek and Roman myths abound with brutal stories of the sexual assault of women by men and gods alike. Classical art often aestheticized such scenes, sanitising any explicit reference to intercourse. In myth, such assaults were partly rationalised by claiming that the god Eros was capable of overpowering male bodies and wills at any moment. This pre-Freudian distinction between the conscious and unconscious suggests the Minotaur – which has remained a symbol of sexual violence and male lust, most prominently in the work of Picasso – might here be read as a horrific embodiment of the sleep of reason.  ( Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable guide p. 33) The sleep of reason. From whose perspective? In my experience rapists take what they feel they deserve. What’

You know the hit is coming and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Your body braces automatically even though logic dictates it won’t make any difference. The torrent is coming at you hard and fast. You are vulnerable. Helpless. Perhaps your slight cower is an attempt at self-comfort and assurance. You did all you could. Broader events were beyond your control. It’s not your fault. You’re collateral damage, and it means nothing about you. It is natural to curl into yourself because who else can you rely on? A saviour, a hero, surely couldn’t make it in time.   Andromeda and the Sea Monster , Damien Hirst, 2011, image June 2017 Andromeda and the Sea Monster is a monumental sculpture in blue bronze depicting a young naked woman chained to a rock face, her head angled off to her right and her mouth open in a horrific silent scream, mirroring the wide, toothy mouths of hungry sea creatures frozen in time and space as they surge at her. You could only see the woman’s scream if you

After some enriching conversations during catch-ups at events celebrating Hugh O'Donnell's life, I've been thinking in depth about art writing practices and the ways we engage with art for ourselves and how we communicate it to others. Explaining my Arts Council England-funded Developing Your Creative Practice project to Brian Patterson and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach of Bbeyond was hugely helpful in nudging me back on some sort of track with things somewhat derailed between mothers flinging themselves about with bone-shattering consequences and friends taken from us far too soon. With everyone's memories of Hugh flowing, my own encounters with him came to the fore, and so I'd like to add to my previous post another instance of where cause, effect and encounter led to my own early experiments with blurring the boundary between written documentation and live performance.  I may well be misremembering and misattributing as it was nine years ago, but let's run with

On Saturday 26 November many of us woke to the deeply sad news of the death the previous day of artist and friend-to-all Hugh O'Donnell. Hugh was a member of the Belfast-based performance art collective Bbeyond, a studio-holder at Flax, and an active campaigner for disabled and LGBTQ+ artists and access to the arts. Most importantly, when you had a conversation with Hugh you came away feeling fantastic, elated, as if you and what you were doing mattered. His loss hits hard. I hadn't seen Hugh for ages, mostly because I hadn't been to Belfast for nearly three years and I didn't bump into him when I finally did visit again this summer. My encounters with Hugh, and often together with his partner Aaron, usually occurred when we were having a skinful at Late Night Art or after a Bbeyond performance monthly. In the interim we'd occasionally 'react' to each other's Facebook posts and that's how I knew he was okay and there.  I didn't see enough of Hugh

  Cronos Devouring his Children , Damien Hirst, 2011, image from Pinterest I remembered his eyes bulging as he tore his children apart. They were actually closed and his mouth gaped. You can almost hear the yells of him. Perhaps my memory of the bulging eyes and manic flesh eating came from an equally graphic painting rather than this sculpture. Knowing me, it was of a totally different character if so. Much of the confronting horror of Cronos Devouring his Children is obscured by coral, with enough of the scene visible that Cronos’s headless young son stretched between his hands and other children gripping his knees evoke the debauched fuller picture. There are other figures around the mounded base of the sculpture, and the guide text assures me that baby Zeus, who would go on to liberate his siblings from inside of his father and later destroy him in the Olympians’ war against the Titans, is present, but I can’t verify this for myself from the photos at my disposal. As happens in

I have the great pleasure of reporting from Lausanne, Switzerland, this week. I've been here giving a guest seminar for my friend Jenn's MA linguistics module on language in TV and film. We did this before but via Zoom during lockdown, and this time everything worked out so I could come in person.  My task was to cover film stylistics and the terminology used in moving image/audiovisual analysis. I also wanted to link to topics such as accent and ethnicity covered elsewhere in the module. My go-to to exemplify all this is No (dir. Pablo Larraín, 2012) as it is a meeting place for television and cinema, the main character (René Saavedra played by Gael Garcia Bernal) has returned from exile to Mexico and is marked as not quite Chilean by his accent, there is a notable absent presence of Chile's indigenous peoples, and it is one of those films whose aesthetics directly impacted by the recording apparatus and the way it has been edited make it an excellent candidate for demonst

The following paragraphs are my supporting statements from an application to Arts Council Northern Ireland's Support for Individual Artists Programme. Even though I reside in England I was encouraged to apply on the basis that others who have had to move from Northern Ireland to Britain for work have been awarded grants in previous years and much of my work is still concerned with home and I still have a family address there. My application was ineligible this year.  *** In observing arts and culture in Northern Ireland for the past 15 years, initially as a scholar of film and visual studies and now as a practitioner developing a creative-critical writing practice, I have identified what I call a performative impulse. The generation of artists prominent in the 1980s to 2000s, to generalise, exhibited more of an archival impulse associated with memory and post-memory processes as examined by Marianne Hirsch, and for example include Willie Doherty, Alastair MacLennan, Victor Sloan an