ART FICTIONS
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.
Episodes
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, dinosau...
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 ins...
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, d...
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 he...
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
...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 reti...
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 pai...
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 cal...
Guest artist AYO AKINGBADE
joins ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss her work via 'In the Eye of the Wild' by Nastassja Martin. Published in 2021, the story follows the aftermath of a French anthropologist's gruesome attack by a bear, while she is living with the Evan people on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
EMAIL US artfictionspodcast@gmail.com
Ayo and Elizabeth's conversa...
Guest artist LAUREN GODFREY
joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Heartburn' by Nora Ephron. Published in 1983, it tells a recipe rich story of Rachel Samstat and her husband Mark's marriage breakdown as a result of his affair with Thelma Rice.
Lauren and Jillian's conversation encompasses misogyny, kreploch soup, fat phobia, hot sass, slaying haters, brilliant naivety, acerbic wit, ca...
Guest artist MARCUS COATES
joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss his work via 'Welsh Incident' by Robert Graves. Published in 1929, this short poem is a retelling of an overhead conversation about "un-Welsh" creatures emerging from the sea.
Marcus and Jillian's conversation encompasses longing, empathy, humour, grasping, death, wolves, psychosis, parenting, migration, birds, badgers, unknowability, ...
Guest artist HELEN JOHNSON
joins JILLIAN KNIPE for this final episode of Series 5, to discuss her work via 'The Birds' by Tarjei Vesaas. Published originally in 1957, then by Penguin Random House in 2019, this short novel describes the relationship between Hege and her younger, mentally challenged brother Mattis. With a sense of non-judgemental simplicity and acute sensitivity, we join the siblings as they negotiate everyday life i...
Guest artist ELEONORA AGOSTINI joins PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her art practice via 'Boxes', a short story featured in 'Elephant and Other Stories' 1998 Collins Harvill. Written by Raymond Carver and originally published in The New Yorker, the story explores connections, disillusion, powerlessness, worry and loss within a mother and son relationship, as well as the distance between listening and hearing.
ELEONORA and Pelumi'...
Guest artist MELANIE JACKSON joins artist JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art practice via 'Corey Fah Does Social Mobility' by Isabel Waidner. Published in 2023 by Hamish Hamilton, part of Penguin Random House, the novel explores binaries, boundaries and borders, freeing us to imagine other ways of being within the context of award winning social mobility, cyclical history, and watching reality TV.
MELANIE and Jillian's discussi...
Guest writer and filmmaker JULIET JACQUES joins artist and writer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her creative practice via 'Variations' 2021 by the one and only Juliet herself. Published in 2021 by Influx Press, this book of short stories portrays the mixed, messy and moving lives of transexual women transexual men, non binary, gender queer, cross dressers and inverts, around London, Manchester, Liverpool, Blackpool, Brighton, Belfast, C...
Guest artist ANNA CLEGG joins curator and critic VANESSA MURRELL to discuss her multi-disciplinary art practice via 'My Loose Thread' by Denis Cooper. Published in 2002 by Canongate Books, this claustrophobic novel circulates around teenage Larry who is wrestling with the point of his own existence and explores teen depression, moral vacuity and the confusion of love.
Please be warned that in following the content of Cooper's text...
Guest artist OLUKEMI LIJADU joins curator and PHD researcher PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her multi-media art practice through the prism of 'The Stranger' (aka 'The Outsider' aka 'The Foreigner') by Nobel Prize winning writer Albert Camus. Published in 1942, the novella tells of an indifferent French settler who, soon after his mother's funeral, commits the senseless murder of an unnamed Arab man on a Algerian beach. Heralded i...
Guest artist RORY PILGRIM joins author and critic ELIZABETH FULLERTON to discuss his musically inspired, community-based art practice through the prism of 'The Bell' by Irish British writer and philosopher, Dame Jean Iris Murdoch. Published in 1958, this funny and sad novel explores religion, human frailty and who has the right to a voice, set within the confines of a lay community.
Please be warned that in following the content of...
Guest artist ANNA BARHAM joins artist JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her art practice via 'Companion Piece' by Ali Smith. Published in 2023 by Penguin Books, the novel explores language, meaning, relationships and contemporary politics in what may be seen as a way of bringing a form of conclusion to Smith's urgently written then quickly published, seasonal texts: Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring.
ANNA and Jillian's discussion encompasses d...
Guest artist MIKHAIL KARIKIS joins poet and art critic CHERRY SMYTH to discuss his art practice via 'Human Acts' by Han Kang, 2016 published by Granta Books. Set in 1980 South Korea, the novel tells the gruelling story of a violently suppressed student uprising and the inevitable fallout from the original trauma.
MIKHAIL and CHERRY's discussion encompasses trust, courage, coalminers, eco-activism, protest and pearl-divers. As well ...
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