With getting to grips with my new full-time and continuing to take on some freelancing around it, I’ve rather abandoned Substack these past two months - and, regrettably, that includes the accounts I follow as well as writing this one as I rarely have a break from screens.
What had me in Leeds mid-week was supposed to be a draft night where up to ten of us holding 2024 Northern Writers’ Awards were due to read our work and get fawned over by literary agents and book industry professionals. There was so little uptake in tickets that it was cancelled two days before. My train tickets and accommodation were non-refundable and it was too short notice to get my holidays back from work, so I went anyway, and wasn’t the weather just glorious this week?
I spent a lot of time in Leeds in 2019 when I was writer in residence for Yorkshire Sculpture International and rather fell in love with it. On my trek from the train station to where I was staying, I passed by my frequent haunts from that time, the Henry Moore Institute (closed for an install), Leeds Art Gallery and the gorgeous library it’s attached to. The sun was shining, and I could work in my now free evening, so I had a poke in.
Greeting me at the door was Stuart Croft’s Eternal Return, consisting of four video installations that each explore the infinite loop of the medium. It was late in the day and I was tired and a bit disoriented after the train journey and not recognising things because the city is so very under reconstruction at the moment, so I sat through just the first one, The Stag Without a Heart from 2010, and knew that 15-years-ago me would’ve had to write a whole essay about it’s Hollywood tropes and sustained story telling.
While wondering around I bumped into an old friend: Eduardo Paolozzi’s AG5 from 1958, cobbled together from collected war-damage debris, and which I attended a workshop with it onsite at a secondary school and wrote about during my residency. I also just really love any of Paolozzi’s work I bump into.
I also enjoyed Karanjit Panesar’s Furnace Fruit which had a nice range of small sculptures, photos etched on steel plates, and an interesting double-channel audiovisual installation whose narrative I didn’t really follow but enjoyed very much sensorily.
Overall, this felt like a nice visit to past me, but I really am happy to leave a lot of this in the past now. My admin job isn’t what I’m built for, but the kind of writing I’m doing doesn’t pay, at least not very much, or not any time soon. And as one of our NWA cohort said, it shows the state of things that our event couldn’t drum up enough interest to run.
I hope you’re all keeping well - do feel free to check in in the comments. I’m quite buried in work, but I’m also trying to live and have some fun and I like hearing from people, so do drop me a line. Lots of love!
Lovely to have you back on here and glad you enjoyed your Leeds trip. I went to university there but alas wasn’t nearly as cultured as you (unless you count pub culture) xx
Aw thanks Sarah. I hope things are settling with you and your girls - read about what sounded like a much-needed breakup and hope your youngest knows her worth to hold out for one with more empathy xx