David Hockney at Salts Mill

(Fax mural detail)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

I used to really dislike German Expressionism and found it gaudy and chaotic (possibly anxiety inducing), but in a displeasing way. I've since come to revisit that opinion and find myself getting lost in the colours, the otherworldly mask-like faces that render his figures almost demonic, and the bulges and surges of city and land scapes depicted almost as haunted children's book illustrations (cursed Dr Seuss?) through unusual camera lenses. 

Vanessa Baird (1963-)

The controversial figure of Emil Nolde (1867-1956)

Emil Nolde was a German Expressionist painter, anti-semite and member of the Nazi Party, despite his work and the movement he was a member of being labeled as 'degenerate art' and rejected and condemned by the regime. Yet, I find his paintings interesting and haunting - stimulates the ongoing question of how we consume art by 'bad people'. I learned about Nolde's work in Christian Kracht's novel Eurotrash. 

For now, some paintings by Nolde:

Favourite books of 2024

First, to spotlight my beautiful friend Annie's exceptionally eloquent, tender and complex memoir essay on caring for her mother, who, having lived for years with MS, decided to stop eating and drinking to end her own life. 

Other favourites this year:

Art references in Jen Calleja’s Goblinhood

Edvard Munch, Goblin with Christmas Porridge (1881)

Vincenzo Campi, The Ricotta Eaters (c. 1538)

Paula Rego, The Seduction of Prince Pig (2006)

Farah Al Qasimi, Hand Print (2021), from the series Poltergeist

Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973)

Witches (2024)

'Witches' is a courageously honest documentary by Elizabeth Sankey that brings together contemporary stories of postpartum depression and psychosis with the history of the prosecution of witches. Taking the form of an essay film, Sankey intersplices clips from popular cinema and television of witches and women in psychiatric institutes alongside personal anecdotes of women she met through her own experience of postpartum depression and anxiety and her time in a mother and baby unit. 

Sankey proposes is that perhaps some of the historical women who were accused of and killed for being witches may have been struggling with their mental health and hormonal shifts after birth. Instead of receiving treatment, they were seen as threats to societal order and God. Sankey and the interviewed women agree that it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that women in the Middle Ages suffering from these postpartum conditions were terrified of their own minds (and at times hallucinations) and the possibility that they might hurt their babies. Their suffering may have been so acute that in their desperate states, they could easily be coerced into confessing being a witch, a death at the stake a presenting a convenient suicidal escape and welcome relief from their ongoing horror. 

The film also suggests that the prosecution and murder of female healers and midwives for being witches has meant that we likely lost key generations of knowledge of the female body and pain, and experience and expertise supporting women through pregnancy, labour and postpartum that may have otherwise informed strides in women's health. Instead, with the threat of female mastery and dominance out of the way, the medical profession was taken over by male doctors and we know the rest... centuries of neglecting women's pain and wellbeing that has led to a disturbing gap in diagnostic research and treatment for women's health and ongoing, avoidable suffering.