In her latest work of creative non-fiction, award-winning author Irenosen Okojie explores the rich legacy of hope and life handed down through her mother and grandmother. In hauntingly beautiful prose, Okojie reflects on how past events can offer light and healing in present times of difficulty.
For Mileva Anastasiadou, speaking two languages has many advantages, but when it comes to writing, it is English that permits her to travel in a way her native tongue does not.
On a trip to Berkeley, California, Molly Gilroy discovered Sylvia Fein’s hypnotic and blazing work, The Painting Told Me What to Do, 2012, an image, which in postcard form, has given her hope during lockdown.
Comfortable in her mother tongue, Turkish, Selin Genc wasn’t prepared for how English would creep into her dreams, thoughts and conversations when moving to Scotland. Here, she talks navigating two languages, two worlds and enjoying the magical mixing of both.
Faith Ringgold’s striking painting, #19 US Postage Stamp, 1967, captures the complexities of the Black Power movement in 60s America and the white supremacist structures African Americans were subject to. But it serves as a metaphor for our times too, writes Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou.
In her latest book, Sex and Lies, translated by Sophie Lewis, Leïla Slimani collects the sexual stories of Moroccan women from all walks of life to create a provoking, yet uplifting narrative.
Rebecca Savage reflects on 60s Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s In the Car, 1963, a colourful work that reminds her of the pre-corona freedoms we’re no longer able to enjoy fully.
Frankie Dytor takes a close look at the image of the father in the Barbican Art Gallery’s extended run of their hit show, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography.
Emma Hanson marks the sixteenth Postcard of the series with Tyler Mitchell’s Untitled – Two Girls Embrace, 2018, which she sees as a celebration of black womanhood, Black freedom and looks to the achievability of a Black utopia.
Translation as a form of reading and the otherness we embrace within ourselves through translated works are explored in Elodie Rose Barnes’ second piece, as part of her Life in Languages series.
In the fifteenth Postcard of the series, Anna Kate Blair contemplates Pixie Colman-Smith’s designs for the Rider-Waite tarot deck and pays close attention to the Hermit, a card whose solitary figure resonates with our times.
In the first of her self-conceived series, The Dinner Party Reloaded, a virtual dinner party with selected artists and writers, Susanna Crossman meets Chiara Ambrosio, Lottie Whalen and Jemima Yong to discuss their creative projects, the looseness of time in lockdown, contact and intimacy in our increasingly digital age and the joys of chickpea stew.
Delving into the rich traditions of gothic literature, sentimental fiction and old folk tales, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, 1782, appears from another world. But not so, says Miriam Al Jamil, who recognises in the painting an awareness of human psychology foreshadowing that found in modern psycho-analysis, dream theory and psychiatry.
