(Parentheses) Review

My Nana was a habidasher, my mother was a habidasher’s assistant, and my great aunt was the head seamstress on a shop floor.  This is a phrase I have written into my work many times, thinking about how there is a lineage of skill, of thread and knowledge between my maternal family. I will admit now that until I read Alice Hattrick’s Fancy WorkI have been ignorant on how much thread and sewing skills hold a rich history: an archive like no other. 

Last November, I visited the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) in Margate. The residency programme only accepts painters, and lasts 15 months. But as I walked around the studio spaces, I didn’t just see paintings, but dozens of leaves of paper: drawings, etchings and poems, pinned to the studio walls. One of the residents, Esme, told me that they are encouraged to create both a drawing and a poem at the beginning of each studio day. These can be throwaways: it’s not important to write well, instead it is an exercise in dual expression.

Being alone, when it works, is a gorgeous paradox. What to me seemed singular, or individual, or individuating about aloneness has been wonderfully disturbed by the writing of Donald Woods Winnicott. In a paper originally given at the Extra Scientific Meeting for British Psychoanalysts in 1957, Winnicott explores what might be obvious to some: that we can only truly be alone in the presence of an other.

Reading the diary of the one you love would be the only sure way to find out their true feelings. I came in through the door and she was standing in the middle of the room, declaring herself, smiling at me in her cute way, rolling her lower lip like a naughty child, playing caught in the act. ‘I did something bad…I looked in your diary.’

In our months of conversation, artist Tarik Ahlip and I kept returning to the idea of imprisonment. In Sri Lanka, where I write from, Bogambara, a maximum-security prison established in 1876 by the British administration, was closed in 2014, with the explicit aim of developing it into a “Cultural Park”. In February 2026, I visited the prison with the hopes of seeing it in its original reputation of stone walls of colonial architecture—it was also recommended to the public as a site of “sightseeing”. 

I wake up to the warmth of Lou’s hand on my face. I open my eyes and see Lou reaching out her hands, smiling. She seems to be in a good mood. I softly plant a kiss on her forehead, then stand up with her strapped to my chest. See the sun set, the day is ending. I look ahead—the mountainous terrain stretches out in front of me, with the open sky sitting behind.
'Okay. Time to head home.'

“My name is Abra. My name is Abra. I had almost forgotten that; the naming of things lost its importance here, with no one to hear them named.” So begins Gaining Ground, the newly reissued novel by Canadian writer Joan Barfoot. Gaining Ground was initially published as Abra in Canada in 1978 and it is being reissued by Faber in the United Kingdom this month. When the book came out it …

On a long walk, I wander into a solo show of the artist Pierette Bloch. 

The main room has a long wall text that I mostly skim ... something about the repetition and rhythm within her practice resembling time within music. 

Across the room, I see a piece covered in short marks of rich black ink.