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

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

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.

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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.

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

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"...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

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

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"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

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.

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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

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.

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EMAIL US artfictionspodcast@gmail.com

Ayo and Elizabeth's conversation encompasses healing, hostility, joy, architecture, nepotism, romance, underdogs, irony, phobias, animism, neglect, transformation, swimming, analogue, memoir, disfigurement, hopefulness, multifaceted, strong women, self-centring, turning points, arthouse niche, tarot reading, anthropological study, defence mechanisms, shared fearlessness, spiritual guides, questioning society's expectations, power in names, thinking the worse, colonisation of microbes, French new wave and the rewards of positive thinking.

AYO AKINGBADE

ayoakingbade.com

'Keep Looking' 2024, 14 minute film

'Head of Idoani Girl' 2024, giclee print

'Show Me the World Mister' 2023, publication

'Faluyi' 2022, 14 minute film

'The Fist' 2022, 24 minute film

'Jitterbug' 2022, 24 minute film

'Dear Babylon' 2019, 21 minute film

'Tower XYZ' 2017 3 minute film

BOOKS WRITERS

Derek Walcott 'The First'

Franz Kafka 'The Trial'

Fred Moten

FILM ARTISTS

Agnès Varda

Alfred Hitchcock

Alice Rohrwacher 'La Chimera'

Chantal Akerman 'Family Business'

Chris Marker 'Sans Soleil'

David Lynch

Harun Farocki 'Workers Leaving the Factory' 1995

Mark Dion

Jacques Rivette

Jean-Luc Godard

Jim Jarmusch

Julian Schnabel 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'

Lumière Brothers 'Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon' 1895

Roni Horn

Stanley Kubrick 'Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'

Steve McQueen 'Caribs' Leap / Western Deep' 2002

Steven Spielberg

Quentin Tarantino 'Inglorious Bastards'

Werner Herzog 'Grizzly Man'

ARCHITECTURE

Dora Boatemah

Le Corbusier

ART INSTITUTIONS

Artangel London

Chisenhale Gallery

Cinereach

Institute of Contemporary Art

John Hansard Gallery

London Film Festival

London LCC

Spike Island

The Baltic Gateshead

The Whitworth

PERFORMERS

Ebenezer Obey 'The Only Condition to Save Nigeria'

Josh O'Connor

Kate Bush

Okwui Okpokwasili

Sade Adu

ART FICTIONS MUSIC Griffin Knipe

ART FICTIONS LOGO Joanna Quinn