Sheila Heti began compiling a decade’s worth of her own diaries after writing her wildly original and often amusing 2012 novel How Should a Person Be?. She loaded half-a-million words typed between her mid-20s and mid-30s into an Excel spreadsheet, and ordered the sentences from A to Z.
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Constance Debré doesn’t believe in art as therapy, but she does believe it can lend a hand in dark times. The French lawyer turned novelist was inspired to write Love Me Tender by her experience of leaving her husband, coming out as a lesbian, and losing custody of her child.
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The first Buckingham Palace fitting fashion designer David Sassoon ever did was a bridesmaid dress for the eight-year-old Princess Anne.
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In the first film Mouna and Lina Soualem made with their mother, Hiam Abbass, personal attachments went out the window: “There’s no time for that.”
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Jeanette Winterson got a police escort so she could make it to Eleanor Shearer’s birth. What’s followed has been years of advice about building a creative life.
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I’m early, but the gallery receptionist tells me that Stanley will be right down. Right down from where, I wonder.
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An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist – at least according to Marina Abramović, who in the 1970s gave us her great manifesto for life and art.
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“They don’t let you smoke here, which is annoying,” Sarah Lucas not quite whispers. Still, as she shrugs on her coat, a bulky thing that swallows her whole, she slips her hands into her pockets and pulls out a tin of tobacco.
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Somaya Critchlow knows that we’re supposed to be moving away from making images of naked female bodies. But her paintings express the appeal of stripping a figure bare.
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Ann Coxon’s grandmother was always knitting. At home in rural Derbyshire, where she raised not only her own children but also evacuees taken in by the family during the Second World War, she was forever making and mending.
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“Imagine you’re on a bike, as opposed to a car, a train, or a plane,” says Tschabalala Self. “Imagine how the world appears, how quickly and easily you’re able to move through it.”
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Zoë Buckman’s uterus has been doing the rounds on social media. The Brooklyn-based artist made the kinetic sculpture in the run-up to the 2016 US election, amid conversations about contraception, abortion and rape.
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There’s a reason why some writers leave their books in a drawer for a while after finishing the first draft. Space away from something—away from anything, really—lets you see it with fresh eyes.
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As a child, Caroline Walker spent hours holed up in a kitchen cupboard in her family home in Dunfermline, Scotland, drawing pictures of women.
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Masha looks cold. She’s chalky white with rosy cheeks and a shiny nose. Her lips are gently pressed together, and her eyes are glassy and wet like they’ve been leaking in the wind. She appears not to have any eyebrows, and her eyelashes are barely visible.
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When Aya Haidar was ten years old, someone asked her what her mum did for a living. She remembers replying, “Oh, my mum doesn’t do anything, she’s just a mum.” Her dad, who rarely raised his voice, told her he didn’t want to hear her saying that ever again.
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The first thing that hits me when I see Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms isn’t the scale (monumental) or the palette (psychedelic) but the paint itself. It’s thick, sticky and a little bit nasty.
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There's something hopeful about Rana Begum's art. The way painting, sculpture and installation shift and morph. The soft pastel colours and the subtle gleam of light.
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“It felt like the right thing for me to do,” says Sungi Mlengeya, when I ask what made her want to paint the women around her. “I’m most inspired by my fellow women and I’m one of them.”
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When Eileen Cooper was a child, her mother used to sit and draw with her in biro on a notepad. “Not that she was ever able to pursue a career in art and I don’t know if she ever had an interest really,” says Eileen, “but I obviously did.”
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