By Naomi Riddle — 27 August, 2021
“The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete.” Sabrina Orah Mark, ‘Fuck The Bread. The Bread Is Over’, The Paris Review, (2020) …
By Naomi Riddle — 29 March, 2021
“About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms and peered around and dived again and surfaced and saw someone and dived again and surfaced.” Alice Oswald, Nobody (2019) “Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.” Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad or The Poem of Force’…
By Naomi Riddle — 27 November, 2020
‘Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts, crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God. I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.’ Max Porter, Grief is the thing with feathers (2015) In February,…
By Naomi Riddle — 30 September, 2020
‘It was a time governed by contradictions, as in I felt nothing and I was afraid.’ Louise Glück, ‘Landscape’, Averno (2006) ‘When I say ‘I,’ when I say ‘my,’ I am behaving like a fruitfully messy lump.’ Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out (2020) Two weeks ago, I injured my right knee. Now, when I…
By Naomi Riddle — 29 May, 2020
‘Quarantine didn’t just take things away; it revealed—with a harsh, unrelenting clarity—what had already been lost.’ Leslie Jamison, ‘When the world went away, we made a new one’, New York Times Magazine, (19/05/20) The world of Covid-19 is a world where Donald J. Trump rolls the dice on a re-election bid and decides 100,000…
By Naomi Riddle — 31 March, 2020
‘In this moment, we have been asked to mitigate being numerous together. Solidarity in the pandemic, for those in my position, is situated in not making things worse; this we can choose.’ Natasha Lennard, ‘After the Quarantine, the Flood’, Commune, (2020) ‘Go back to Tolstoy, forget the dystopias you got second-hand from crappy TV, say…
By Naomi Riddle — 21 February, 2020
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s summer exhibition, Cornelia Parker, is a retrospective of the celebrated British artist’s work. Parker is the tenth artist to feature in the Sydney International Art Series—an initiative undertaken in partnership with the NSW Government to bring internationally recognised artists to Australian audiences. Parker is best known for her large-scale installations,…
By Naomi Riddle — 31 January, 2020
“Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition. What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth.” Ali Smith, Spring (2019) “Governments which lead the masses into misery must guard against the masses’ thinking about government…
By Naomi Riddle — 29 November, 2019
‘Data is the new big ‘cheap thing’—the new commodity class that is emerging to reshape the world and provide a new arena for accumulation and enclosure.’ Kelly Pendergrast, ‘The Next Big Cheap’, Real Life (2019) ‘We were lost in a language of images. It was growing difficult to speak. Yet talk Was everywhere.’ Ariana Reines,…
By Naomi Riddle — 29 October, 2019
‘Need I say more? The field is wide open as I thought to mention in the beginning, thinking of how I feel about the difficulty of puffing your way up a steep hill on a bike that isn’t motorised. The future is upon us and the Art of Criticism has already come into its own…