MEDUSA

31/01/2026

Eden and I were both so honoured to have a prose piece published in Land Ahead’s Autumn zine - thank you Kiera and Henry for creating such a beautiful press and giving our words a wonderful home 🍂

I’ve read at each of the launches so far, firstly Spring , then Summer .london and most recently Autumn . It’s been really special seeing the community grow and grow, befriending other contributors and getting to hear the zines being brought to life in such warm and supportive spaces. With every publication I’ve been astounded by Kiera’s talent and devotion - she stitches and binds every copy! For the Autumn zine, she even illustrated every single piece - the delicate leaf accompanying mine is something I’ll always treasure. Taking the seasons in turn allows for an eclectic mix of responses and Land Ahead’s thoughtful curation really makes our ideas sing 🍂

Feels like it’s about time to delve into thinking about winter ❄️

Emily xx

21/09/2024

‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a colour.’

Have you read Bluets by Maggie Nelson? This deceptively slender book is an inventive, unguarded, exquisitely tender memoir in the form of numbered propositions. Under the guise of unravelling the experience of becoming enamoured with the colour blue, it tackles ginormous questions - what makes a life worth living? How do we hold ourselves together in the midst of pain and suffering?

‘This half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it.’

Bluets is driven by feeling, not plot. It doesn’t make for an obvious or easy stage adaptation, but I imagine that’s exactly why the prospect was so enticing.

‘Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.’

In late Spring/early Summer this year, Margaret Perry’s adaptation of Bluets was performed at the Royal Court by Kayla Meikle, Emma D’Arcy and Ben Whishaw. A genre-defying book demanded a genre-defying play, so the show took the form of ‘live cinema’, a technique conceptualised by the production’s director, Katie Mitchell, in which the action on stage resembles a film shoot, with the live-recorded footage being simultaneously streamed to screens above the stage, emulating the experience of watching a film in a cinema.

I found it all so mesmerising and it made the book even more resonant. The live cinema format was the perfect vehicle for creating layers and duplications, serving to illuminate Nelson’s evocation of feeling alienated by your own sadness and searching for meaning in the depths of heartache - powerful stuff 💙

Emily xx

08/09/2024

‘When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed.‘

My favourite thing I’ve read this week is ‘The Great Awake’ by Julia Armfield, winner of ’s short story prize in 2018. I discovered it having raced through ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’, keen for more of Armfield’s creepy and compelling speculative fiction.

What a knock-out first line!! ‘The Great Awake’ imagines a world not too dissimilar from our own, other than the matter of certain city dwellers’ sleep eluding them, taking on an uncanny, human-like form. Strangely, those who haven’t been severed from their sleep appear envious of their counterparts, rather than relieved not to have been afflicted by this ominous phenomenon.

It’s such a strong concept and the atmosphere Armfield conjures is wonderfully eerie. I’m enjoying pondering the layers of symbolism and all that the story reveals about desire, yearning, agency, capitalism and our subconscious - the list goes on I’m sure!

Emily xx

31/08/2024

Back in April, we had the absolute joy of visiting Zineb Sedira’s ‘Dreams Have No Titles’ . This exhibition was a glorious polar opposite to any sterile, white cube-esque gallery space you might have visited and felt a bit too cold in. Instead, Sedira’s show was full of warmth, vibrant, saturated hues, sparkly light and a welcoming sense of home.

‘Dreams Have No Titles’ (what a great title itself!) debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2022. Moving between film, sculpture, photography and dance, Sedira’s work is abundant and immersive. To blur the edges between reality and imagination, she takes viewers behind the scenes, stages film sets, piles film reels high and shares both miniature and full-size reconstructions of her inviting Brixton living room. In so doing, she exposes the complex layers and power structures of historical archives and storytelling.

It was really wonderful to hear from the artist herself before we explored her show. Sedira had such a warm-hearted and joyful presence, which made for a really poignant contrast with her practice’s focus on examining colonisation, liberation struggles and displacement. By intertwining her personal biography with activist films produced across France, Algeria and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, Sedira’s art highlights the vital nature of making space for joy, be that through dance, collaborating with friends or telling the stories that matter with care and creativity.

17/08/2024

It’s the last weekend of this year’s Summer Exhibition at the RA. A great choice of theme - Making Space - a bold and wise move for a show that’s pretty much always described as too dense and overwhelming. I only wish they’d taken it a bit further and given the artworks even more room to breathe!

Sculptor Ann Christopher is the co-ordinator and here’s her intro:

“I plan to explore the idea of making space, whether giving space or taking space. This can be interpreted in various ways: to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things.
It is my belief that the spaces in between are as important as whatever those spaces separate.

Spaces can not only dramatically enhance the actual works on the wall but also the pleasure of viewing them. In terms of sculpture - well that gives off its own demand for space around it.“

Swipe for some works that stood out from the crowd - embroidered rage, greetings from Susanna, Barbie beheading Holofernes, soft light in Miro’s studio, foreboding, snaking horsehair and quirky portraits 🎨

1. A Common Thread - Sophie-Louise Pywell
2. Susanna Says F Off - Pollyanna Johnson
3. Susanna in the Stream (After Rembrandt) - Anna Grayson
4. A selection from Cornelia Parker’s room
5. Bored of the Patriarchy (Judith and Holofernes) - Laura Critchlow
6. The Meddling Fiend - Nicola Turner
7. Mallorca (Joan Mirò Atelier by Josep Lluís Sert in Palma) - Lorenzo Zandri
8. A selection curated by Ann Desmet

10/08/2024

I’m sure it goes without saying, but my photos of Nengi Omuku’s paintings really don’t do them justice. I paid a flying visit to ‘The Dance of People and the Natural World’ at a little while back and found it so soothing and hopeful, the experience has really stayed with me.

Here’s a snippet of the exhibition’s intro -
“Omuku (b.1987), who lives and works in Lagos, first began to paint the natural world on returning to Nigeria after studying at The Slade School of Fine Art, London. Inspired by her horticulturalist mother, the landscape offered a place of peace in response to the country’s complex political situation, allowing Omuku to look back at happier times.
Omuku describes the work she has created over the last three years as ‘psychological spaces’ that move beyond the traditions of colonised landscapes in which land was fought over and won. Instead, within her thinly painted layers of oil, both nature and humans are allowed to coexist as one.”

Omuku’s paintings are full of warmth, serenity and a really tender sense of longing for paradise to be within reach. Her canvas is Sanyan, a pre-colonial West Nigerian textile used traditionally for celebratory clothing, which she unstitches and then pieces back together to form a flat surface upon which she can paint. I really appreciated how each piece of fabric is suspended quite far forward from the gallery walls, surrounded by a generous amount of space, meaning you can get up close to admire the details. As the works aren’t framed, there are gentle movements where there might otherwise be rigidity, and their enticing textures given centre stage.

I’m reading Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad at the moment and it contains a passage in there about art speaking to us, acknowledging suffering and that being akin to dressing a wound, enabling us to carry on and feel relief from despair, but how do we make sure such relief doesn’t shield us from being galvanised to keep pushing for what matters? I don’t have an answer to that, but just thought it was a question worth sharing.

Emily xx

29/03/2024

Had a slow start to the long weekend watching this and oh my word so glad I did! If you haven’t done so already - you need to. It’s tender and powerful and inspiring and all of that feels like an understatement.

All of Kae’s words move me but ‘On Connection’ is always going my favourite:

“Every shouted greeting, every stalling car, every siren, every screaming kid, dog, fox, radio. All that sound out there is life and people living. Not background sound. But close up. Front and centre. See all those windows in all those buildings? Look up. There’s life in there. Put yourself away.
Let go of yourself. Tune in to other people. To the movement in the branches, the sudden coming of rain or the patterns in the waves. To how those two lie on the grass. To how that one sits on the bench with their hands clasped, looking up. To how those three stand at the crossing, playing with each other’s hair. To how that young one shifts the weight of those shopping bags and tries to keep up with their mother’s strong legs.
This is it. This is the thing. This is the beautiful thing.”

Emily xx

17/08/2023

Some of my favourites from this year’s Summer Exhibition at the RA. The theme this time around is ‘On Connection’ - so on the whole it was the portraits that really resonated for me (though as always lots of brilliant sculpture, architectural models & digital film to be discovered there too!)

1. Just love the textures, tenderness, warmth & generosity of this one, all offset by that elusive, pensive expression. You can really sense the tension embedded in this moment of care; the defensiveness of time spent in private readying herself for the outside world. [The Sitter ]

2. Obsessed with how that golden hour light hits the sitter’s hair and skin. So clever how this feels both intimate and as if we’re being kept at a distance. [A New Day ]

3. The skill of this photo realism is something else! Adore the hyper focus on delicate details like the eyelashes and smile lines. [Sitting ]

4. Paula Rego incites terror & abject fascination like no-one else - what a spine-tingling construction. I love the precariousness of it, those horrific dolls threatening to spill out at any moment. [Oratorio ]

5. The seafoam scrawls & controlled chaos of Tracey Emin embraces. [From the Mountain to the Lake ]

6. Oof. What a tender evocation of motherhood, full of anticipation. She looks so young and that empty cot is so captivatingly rendered. The scale of this one is really effective, urging us to look up and behold. [Birthing Ball ]

7. Here for the moody ferocity & larger than life proportions of Chantal Joffe’s portrait of Katy Hessel. So much emotion in those strokes of blue! [Katy (January) ]

8. I’m such a fan of the ways this assortment interact with each other - striking monochrome subtlety contrasting with textured pops of colour [Circle Line | Braces | Agnes | Joan Mitchell… | Lockdown Portrait 4 ]

Emily x

04/12/2022

With themes of dissatisfaction, bodies and sanctuaries on our minds, our research led us to this incredible interview with by on - would highly recommend 👀

21/11/2022

Happening tonight! Link’s on linktr.ee/medusacreatives or we can send it through on DM. We’re using Google Meet so you’ll need a Google account and either browser (Chrome/Safari/Edge/Firefox) or the Google Meet app.

Join us online on Mon 21 Nov for our first ‘work in progress’ session - a space to come together and share what you’re working on, bounce ideas and get feedback.

Whether you’re a writer, visual artist, or musician, come with an open mind!

Zoom link to follow (all free)

[consider what and how you can share your work in an online space: through screensharing, reading, or idea-generating]