ART FICTIONS

Jillian Knipe
  • 4.0 (1)
  • Visual Arts
  • Updated Monthly

ART FICTIONS is a monthly, contemporary art meets literature programme, created by artist Jillian Knipe. Each guest artist selects a piece of fiction, which we both explore, then use as a lens through which to view their artwork. We delve into the book‘s themes, context and characters, which opens up and steers a rich conversation about the artist‘s practice. The podcast bounces back and forth between art and text, all the while focussing on the ideas which govern both. It is a way of talking alongside art, rather than directly at it, getting close and personal with the origins of artistic ideas. Hosting is shared amongst a small group of artists, critics and curators, and artists are selected based on each host's area of specific interest.  Support via PATREON or BUY ME A COFFEE and follow Art Fictions on Instagram for images of works and links.

  1. Jul 20

    Eco-mythical Exploration and Poetic Science (QIAN QIAN)

    Guest artist QIAN QIAN joins independent curator, consultant and Reike instructor BECCA PELLY-FRY to discuss her work via 'Cosmicomics' by Italo Calvino. First published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968, Cosmicomics is a collection of short stories, mostly circling around a character called Qfwfq, which connect to real events in the history of the universe. Becca and Qian Qian talk about parody, craters, peduncles, dinosaurs, fingernails, eclipses, tadpoles, surrealism, flipping, bitumen, seahorses, lentils, cartilage, honey, moulds, pollens, worms, resin, pepper, gravity, acrobatics , Galileo, astrophysics , labyrinth, apparatus, trilobites , embyro, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, gelatinous matter, mineral salts, combustion residue, scabby terrain, Big Bang , scientific theory, amazing creativity, deep time, human urgency , banal mundanity, Milky Way, judging others, zinc cliffs, moon milk, imaginative worlds, Chinese medicine, resolution changes, zombie movie Monty Python, watercolor paintings, Scottish countryside, scientific imagery, hero's journey , space bodies, celestial bodies, measuring devices, zen philosophy, black hole, sepia tint, spiritual rebirth, cosmic egg , world building, participatory art, energetic realm, spiritual journey, drinking whiskey, evolutionary biology, invisible radiation, ancient civilization, traditional Buddhism, dusk til dawn, the Italian resistance, grumpy old men, thousand armed being, flights of fancy, pillars of ice, reasoning and logic, stream of consciousness, cosmic know-it-all, climbing onto the moon, being dragged into the story, combining science and literature, the dream inside the dream inside the dream, and the light of near-death experiences. QIAN QIAN qianqianart.org @ivyivymuami 'Fountains of Enceladus' Lychee One 30 April - 30 May 2026 'La Mariposa (Butterfly Woman)' Soho Revue 12 Feb - 15 March 2025 BECCA PELLY-FRY beccapellyfry.com @beccapf 'La Mariposa' ARTISTS Cecilia Charlton Holly Stevenson Lee Bontecue Leonora Carrington Marina Abramovic Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis) William Blake BOOKS + FILM + WRITERS Alejandro Jodorowsky 'The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky' Alejandro Jodorowsky 'The Holy Mountain' Clarissa Pinkola Estês 'Women Who Run with the Wolves' Galileo Galilei Italo Calvino 'If On a Winter's Night a Stranger' Italo Calvino 'Invisible Cities' Julio Cortázar 'Cronopios Famas' Monty Python 'Life of Brian' GALLERIES + EVENTS Gallery 66 Lychee One Open Art Folke Soho Revue

  2. Jun 17

    Self Otherness and Hybrid Beings (HOLLY STEVENSON)

    Guest artist HOLLY STEVENSON joins Freud Museum curator VANESSA BONI and JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Down Below' by Leonora Carrington. The original manuscript was "lost", so it was re-written via dictation and first published in 1944 in the surrealist journal VVV. Having fled from Nazi occupied France after her lover Max Ernst was arrested, the book describes first hand Carrington's traumatic confinement in a mental institution in Spain and her escape, eventually settling in Mexico City. It also connects directly with her 1940 painting of the same name.   We discuss hybrids, psychosis, illness, seamstresses, figurines, transference, trauma, worms, bedsheets, potency, alchemy, lucidity, fetishes, limbs, candy, autofiction, worms, visions, rebirth, Oedipus, transference, psychoanalysis, surrealism, netsuki, genius, creative coherence, brutal rape, civil war, role reversals, mythological beasts, defending insanity, hearing ghosts, colour shifts, inner transformation, wild tiger, symptomatic gut, dynamic unconscious, mythic underworld, female identity, symbolic structures, being celiac, the drive to create, Nazi occupied France, the surrealist imagination, borders of knowledge, structure of the unconscious, orange blossom poisoning, green as a magic colour, the studio and the couch, the Santander sketchbooks, and alternative ways of engaging with reality. 'Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal' curated by Vanessa Boni at Freud Museum 25 March - 10 August 2026 HOLLY STEVENSON holly-stevenson.co.uk @holly_stevenson MAC Museum of Contemporary Art Gibellina City of Culture The Sainsbury Centre RAMM The Royal Albert Memorial in Exeter 3 Oct 2026 - 21 Feb 2027 'Living Labrynths: Art and Fungi' 'Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable' 14 May - 29 June 2025 including essays by Elizabeth Fullerton, Sharon Kivland and Emily Steer 'The Debate' Frieze 2023 curated by Fatos Üstek 'Another Mother' 2022 The Artist's Garden  'Mother Art Prize' 2020 ARTISTS  Daniel Buren Dorothea Tanning Leonora Carrington Louise Bourgeois Max Ernst Tracey Emin Salvador Dali BOOKS + WRITERS + THEORISTS Ali Smith Professor Alyce Mahon  Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 'Book of Symbols' Carl Jung Jane McAdam Freud Leonora Carrington 'The Debutante', 'The Hearing Trumpet', 'The Oval Lady' Marina Warner Mikhail Bulgakov 'The Master and Margharita' Pierre Mabille  Prophecy Cole 'The Shadow of the Second Mother' Sigmund Freud 'The Interpretation of Dreams'  GALLERIES + GALLERISTS + INSTITUTIONS The Artists' Garden created by Claire Mander at thecolab.art support via change.org 'Long Live the Artist's Garden' Faro Santander supported by Fundación Banco Santander Freud Museum National Gallery Edinburgh Peggy Guggenheim Tate Gallery

  3. May 13

    Life Legacies and Canvas Portals (SOPHIE VON HELLERMANN)

    Guest artist SOPHIE VON HELLERMANN joins MARCELLE JOSEPH to discuss her work via 'Martyr!' by Kaveh Akbar.  Originally published in 2024 by Knopf, it portrays bereaved Iranian-American writer, searching for a reason to live. Sophie and Marcelle talks about love, survival sacrifice, guilt, lightness, martyrdom, autofiction, resourcefulness, addiction, mythology, baroque, discovering, uncovering, subconscious, action painting, dark angels, lavender buds, raw pigments, suicidal ideation, time travel, hot stones, fleeting images, crimson flowers, catalyst for change, painting on the walls and walking hand in hand with Turner along the beach in Margate. SOPHIE VON HELLERMANN @sophievonhellerman 'Wabi-Sabi: Untangling the Meaning of Beauty' until 14 September 2026, Paul Smith Space, London  Pilar Corrias Gallery London 'Sophie von Hellermann: Letters to a Young Painter' until 13 June, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin 'After a Dream' 30 April - 20 June, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York ARTISTS  Caspar David Friedrich Dieter Krieg Francis Bacon Henri Matisse Marlene Dumas JMW Turner Paula Rego Robert Kushner Vincent Van Gogh BOOKS + WRITERS Arthur Conan Doyle 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' Hafez Virginia Woolf 'Mrs Delaware' Rainer Maria Rilke 'Letters to a Young Poet', 'The Panther' Rumi

  4. Mar 24

    Mind Palaces and Benevolent Djinn (HAROUN HAYWARD)

    Guest artist HAROUN HAYWARD joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss his work via 'The Sea The Sea' by Iris Murdoch. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, it was first published in 1978 by Chatto & Windus, and most recently by Vintage Classics as part of Penguin Books. The chaotic story centres around Charles Arrowby, a director, actor and playwright who has retired from his highly glamorous London life to become something of a hermit in a near isolated house by the sea. Just like in slapstick theatre he bumps up against a myriad of characters, including his buddhist cousin James, his childhood sweetheart Mary Hartley Fitch, ex lover Lizzie Scherer whose life he destabilises once again, and Lizzie’s ex lover before Charles - Peregrine Arbelow, the Irish drunk. Get in touch with us via artfictionspodcast@gmail.com Buy us a coffee! Support us on Patreon! Haroun and Jillian's conversation encompasses skateboarding, cancer, philosophy, thalassophobia, repetition, serpents, Japan, overthinking, identity, unclean, synesthesia, graffiti, enlightenment, hippiedom, apophenia, keystones, dog poo, constructivism, cascading failures, narrative honesty, suprematicism, magic realism, suppressing thought, apocalypse fish, landscape painting, self flagellation, vorticism, etching plates, herding cats, horror films, zombie formalism, lack of soul and poetry, and giving up painting to be a fry cook. HAROUN HAYWARD harounhayward.com @harounhayward 'Path Through Trees' 30 May - 1 Nov 2026 ARTISTS + WORKS Ben Nicholson Ben Westerby Bridget Riley Carolin Walker Chris Offili Édouard Vuillard Frankie Knuckles Hans Memling Hergé 'The Adventures of Tintin' Hokusai 'The Great Wave' Model 500 Paul Nash 'The Wanderer'  Paul Nash 'Path through Trees' Peter Doig Pieter Bruegel the Elder Philip Guston 'I Paint What I Want to See' Sonia Delaunay Shezad Dawood Ukiyo-e Wassily Kandinsky Wilhelmina Barnes Graham Winifred Nicholson WRITERS + BOOKS Edward James Gabriel García Márquez Haruki Murakami Iris Murdoch 'The Black Prince' + 'The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited' + 'The Severed Head'  John Burnside 'Black Cat Bone'  Kim Sloan 'Places of the Mind: British Watercolour Landscapes 1850-1950'  Maurice Merleau-Ponty Tom McCarthy 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature' William Shakespeare 'King Lear' + 'The Tempest' ARTS ORGANISATIONS Goldsmiths Hales Gallery Indigo Madder - Kritika Sharma Kunsthistorisches Museum Pallant House Tate St Ives Thamesside Studios Turner Contemporary West Dean College Zwirner Gallery

  5. Feb 13

    Minor Violence and Productive Confusion (JENNET THOMAS + SALLY O'REILLY)

    Guest artists JENNET THOMAS and SALLY O'REILLY come together to discuss their work via the short story 'Critique' by Ben Marcus. Published in 2018 by Alfred A Knopf and Grant Books, it is one of 13 stories appearing in 'Notes from the Fog' which explore dysfunction, desolation and disconnection within a woundingly funny collision of art and reality. 'The Big Throw' at SET Social 23 April 2026 Buy us a coffee! Support us on Patreon! Get in touch! artfictionspodcast@gmail.com "...narrative plot and how sticky and unpleasant it can be" JT "The idea of just working in response to the infinity of the universe is appalling to me" SO'R Sally and Jennet's conversation encompasses anti-plot, delirium, vertigo, maximalism, hermeticism, visitations and the grotesque. Yearning superpowers of persuasion, they go on and about carboot sales, ontological slippage, lemon sucking, deceptive loops, skewing language, twiddling knobs, automatic sterilisers, visually flamboyant, minor violences, constricting constraints, painting barcodes, slyly political, shifting rules, making knickerbockers, troubling reality, social reproductions, found objects, draped flesh, ecstatic technology talk, working in a factory, the pleasure of difficulty, a taste in the head, reality from the inside out, audience participation as part of the materials, weirdness coming into the living room, jumping to the whip of the ref, being wary of simplification and elegance, well made in a brutal violent sense at gunpoint, and a seal in mud with a lion's head. JENNET THOMAS jennetthomas.com @jennetthomas 'School of Change' 2012 'All Suffering SOON TO END!' 2010 'Return of the Black Tower (after John Smith)' 2007 SALLY O'REILLY sallyoreilly.org.uk @manfredopenarms 'The Money Laundering Service' 2025 'Dog Shelves' 2024 'Where They Gather' 2022 'Estee Lauder Factory' 2022 'The Annual Retrieval' 2016 'The Virtues of Things' 2015   "I can't breath" Eric Garner George Floyd ARTISTS John Smith Kit Downes Klara Kofen Leo Chadburn Matt Rogers Maz Murray Simeon Barclay WRITERS + BOOKS Christine Brooke-Rose Frieze magazine M John Harrison Muriel Spark Russell Hoborn 'Riddley Walker' Sally O'Reilly 'Help in Cucumbers' Will Self William Empson FILM + TELEVISION 'Bedknobs and Boomsticks' 'Brimstone and Treacle' Dennis Potter Michael Kitchen 'The Terminator' GALLERIES + ORGANISATIONS Bandcamp Horse Hospital Matts Gallery ICA Institute Contemporary Art October House Records Opera North Royal Opera House SET Social SLG South London Gallery

  6. Jan 29

    Beautiful Viciousness and Colourful Ova (CARRIE MOYER)

    Guest artist CARRIE MOYER joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker. Published in 1962 by Houghton Mifflin (US) and Victor Gollancz (UK), most recently Daunt Books, with sympathetic tenderness and acerbic wit, it follows twin sisters Cassandra and Judith as they navigate Judith’s wedding to a very pleasant and capable young doctor. The other key characters are their father, a retired philosophy professor who fancies a Brandy soda tipple, the ghost of their dead mother and their maternal grandmother. Get in touch with us via artfictionspodcast@gmail.com Buy us a coffee! Support us on Patreon!   "it feels like all of the interesting innovations have been done by women painters in terms of abstraction" Carrie and Jillian's conversation encompasses activism, wit, abandonment, confusion, family, ambivalence, agitpop, snarkiness, ambiguity, galaxy, queer, optical bliss, transitional places, menacing edge, geological time, mental illness, burying identity, utter distaste, ominous vibe and deadpan humour. They also talk about family as a cult, female body parts, destabilised vibration of colours, digging under conventions, being a lesbian in public, hard edge abstraction, vicious in a great beautiful smart way, wholesome hetro homemakers, abstract expressionism as a language and what the future is supposed to hold for you as a young woman. CARRIE MOYER 'Always Venus, Never Mars' Pilar Corrias 23 Jan - 7 Mar 2026 carriemoyer.com @carrie.moyer.studio 'Queer Abstraction' Des Moines Art Center by Curator Jared Ledesma 1 Jun - 8 Sep 2019 'Cave Dwellers who Paint Abstraction' 2025 'Radiant Granularity' 2025 'Art Glass' 2016 ARTISTS + CURATORS Amy Sillman Anish Kapoor Béla Bartók David Getsy Dona Nelson Elizabeth Murray Frank Stella Helen Frankenthaler Jack Whitten '9.11.01' 2006 after Sep 11 2001 Judy Chicago Laura Owens Louise Fishman Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley 'Best Femmes Forever' Morris Louis Pat Steir Rebecca Byrne Rochelle Feinstein Sabine Moritz Stephen Meuller William Butler Yeats BOOKS + AUTHORS + FILM Anna Burns 'The Milkman' narrator Brid Brennan Arundhati Roy 'Mother Mary Comes to Me' Audible 'Carrie Moyer' 2021 with contributions by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Katy Siegel, Joanna Dinah Fateman by Rizzoli Electa Flann O'Brien 'The Third Policeman' narrator Jim Norton J D Salinger 'Catcher in the Rye' John Gray 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' 'The Ice Tower' Travis Jeppesen 'Queer Abstraction (Or How to Be a Pervert with No Body) Some Notes Toward a Probability' Mousse magazine 2019 'Young Man with a Horn' 1950 UNIVERSITIES + ORGANISATIONS Boston University Daunt Books Hunter College, New York London Film Festivals MoMA, New York 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger' 2025 Pratt Institute

  7. 12/02/2025

    Catch Up with ALICE BROWNE

    From Episode 9, ALICE BROWNE chats with JILLIAN KNIPE about what she's been doing, reading and seeing, as well as her hopes for the year ahead.  We delve into worship, floating, yellow, sainthood, caves, underwolds, pergatory, visceral visions, dark spaces, psychological potential, sharing dreams, self destruction, happy endings, vertical journeys, painting cracks, slapstick behaviour, maleable materials, early renaissance paintings and being a shit actress. ALICE BROWNE alicebrowne.com @alicerbrowne ARTISTS Adam Hennessey Ann Hamilton Gabriela Giroletti Giovanni de Paolo Hannah Hughes Hannah Tilson Jennifer Caroline Campbell Josephine Baker Laura White Lauren Godfrey Lena Brazen Lucy Mayes Mikhail Karikis Oona Grimes Pia Pack Zadie Xa BOOKS + WRITERS The Call of Cthulhu by H P Lovecraft Cherry Smyth The Divine Comedy by Dante Drowned World by J G Ballard Love Letter by George Saunders The Natural Pigment Handbook by Lucy Mayes Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy ORGANISATIONS + COLLECTIVES A P P E A R Artworks Binder of Women Bow Arts Gillian Jason Gallery Hypha Studios National Gallery Outpost Gallery Pinnacle Climbing Club Sainsbury Wing Salts Mill  Turner Prize

  8. 10/22/2025

    Reconfigured Memories and Watery Connections (ALINE MOTTA)

    Guest artist ALINE MOTTA joins PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her work via 'Water is a Time Machine' by the artist herself. Originally published in Brazilian Portuguese by Fósforo Editora and Luna Parque Edições in 2022, the text reconfigures memories by using a non-linear perception of time and is part of a multi-layered project including video and performance. It includes personal documents that belong to the artist's mother, her calendars and journals from the 1970s and an account of her death in 2011, which is the central piece and backbone of the work. FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM! @artfictionspodcast BUY US A COFFEE! buymeacoffee.com/artfictionspodcast CONTRIBUTE VIA PATREON! patreon.com/artfictionspodcast EMAIL US DIRECTLY! artfictionspodcast@gmail.com Aline and Pelumi discuss the book's stories around the artist's family members and their lives in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century, a time of political turmoil which immediately followed the abolition of slavery. Their conversation encompasses floating, bombs, bridges, tuberculosis, mistranslation, iconography, submerging, chemotherapy, prayer, breathing, stoicism, Catholicism, time machines, interracial marriage, film school, personal archives, double images, direct communication, permanent connections, exchanging cells, changing organs, fraught connections, Congolese traditions, disciplinarian mothers, avoiding sugarcoating, intentional disorientation, umbilical cords, oral histories, heavy heartedness, Yoruba influences, colonial erasure, speculative studies, layers of time, writing in fragments, metaphors of motherhood, constructing new narratives, sleeping in hammocks, foundations of thought, clothes being archives, abolition of slavery, lineage as language, contradictions in relationships, the beginning of the Republic, the way histories are told in (black) families, trying to find reasons for a person's death, the magic of making someone breath under water, using words to make maps, connecting personal history with collective history, envisioning new pasts to free us from old narratives and manifest new futures, plus a recipe to treat bruises.   ALINE MOTTA alinemotta.com @1alinemotta 'A água é uma máquina do tempo' / 'Water is a time machine' '(Outros) Fundamentos' / '(Other) Foundations' 'Pontes sobre Abismos' / 'Bridges over the Abyss'   INSTITUTIONS Bienal de São Paulo 2023 'Choreographies of the Impossible' Buenos Aires, Palermo Buenos Aires, Argentina Centre Pompidou, France MALBA Museo de Arte Lanoamericano de Buenos Aires / Latin American Art Museum of Rietberg Museum, Zurich   ARTISTS + FILM + WRITERS 'BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions' 2025  John Akomfrah 'Vertigo Sea' 2015 Kathleen Collins 'Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?' 2016 Kahlil Joseph 'Losing Ground' 1982 Machado de Assis 'Father Against Mother' 1906 Professor Stuart Hall (1932-2014) Rosana Paulino Saidiya Hartman 'Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route' 2006 'The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy' 1980   PLACES Angola Australia Bahia Bahia Brazil Burma Cachoeira Congo Germany Ghana Guanabara Bay Myanmar Niterói Nigeria Portugal Rio de Janeiro São Paulo  Sierra Leone Torres Strait Islands   TERMS + CULTURAL GROUPS ase/ashe Bantu languages capoeira martial art movement Kimbundu/Mbundu language maracatu dance ori orishas oyinbo/oyibo samba dance Yoruba

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About

ART FICTIONS is a monthly, contemporary art meets literature programme, created by artist Jillian Knipe. Each guest artist selects a piece of fiction, which we both explore, then use as a lens through which to view their artwork. We delve into the book‘s themes, context and characters, which opens up and steers a rich conversation about the artist‘s practice. The podcast bounces back and forth between art and text, all the while focussing on the ideas which govern both. It is a way of talking alongside art, rather than directly at it, getting close and personal with the origins of artistic ideas. Hosting is shared amongst a small group of artists, critics and curators, and artists are selected based on each host's area of specific interest.  Support via PATREON or BUY ME A COFFEE and follow Art Fictions on Instagram for images of works and links.

Information

  • Creator
    Jillian Knipe
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    64
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    ART FICTIONS

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