ART FICTIONS

Guest artist MARY RAMSDEN joins painter and producer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her practice via 'The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story' by Brian Swimme. Published in 1994 by First published in 1984 by Bear and Company, it conveys a dialogue between a young person and a wise elder, exploring science, cosmology and spirituality.

Mary and Jillian's conversation encompasses osmosis, nothing, after-images, noticing, protons, joy, cosmology, confusion, contradiction, unification, no-thing-ness, particles, universe, dragon, potentiality, transformation, electrons, stickiness, moonlight, quantum fluctuations, unfinished sentences, dissolving egos, close attention, contained memory, influx charge, generative nothingness, cosmic party, porous people, holding energy, remembering beauty, quantum theory, rowdy space capsule, potential for change, collective human consciousness, states of being and the production of beauty

MARY RAMSDEN

Pilar Corrias 'The Feeling of What Happens' 10 September - 7 November 2026

PODCASTS

'Critics at Large' The New Yorker

'New & Ancient' The Cosmos Watching Itself 2019

'On Being' with Krista Tippett 'The Mystery of Consciousness' 2026

'On Being' with Krista Tippett 'Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing' 2026

'On Being' with Krista Tippett 'John O Donohue' 2008

'The Daily' New York Times

'The Next Big Idea'

ARTISTS

Agnes Pelton

Agnes Martin

Alice Browne

Barbara Kruger

Becca Pelly-Fry

Capability Brown

Cecilia Charlton

Édouard Vuillard

Ernest Hemmingway

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Francesco Clemente

Hilma af Klimt (The Five)

Holly Stevenson

Leonard Cohen

Leonardo da Vinci

Pierre Bonnard

Qian Qian

Robert Morris

Tom Waits

Wassily Kandinsky

WRITERS + BOOKS

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker 'Journey of the Universe'

Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry 'The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era'

Brian Swimme and Monica Deraspe-Bolles 'The Story of the Noosephere'

Brian Swimme 'Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe'

Claire Louise Bennett 'Big Kiss, Bye Bye'

Italo Calvino 'The Complete Cosmicomics'

Stewart Lee

Victoria Chang 'With My Back to the World'

THEORISTS + SCIENTISTS

Antonio Damasio - Portuguese-American neuroscientist, neurologist, author

Bernardo Kastrup - Dutch philosopher, computer engineer, author 'Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics'

Christof Koch - German American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist, computational neuroscientist, author

David Chalmers - Australian philosopher, author, cognitive scientist specialising in philosophy of mind and language

John O'Donohue - Irish poet, author, priest, Hegelian philosopher

E F Schumacher - German-born statistician, economist, author

Michael Pollan - American journalist, professor, author

Neils Bohr - Danish theoretical physicist, philosopher, Nobel prizewinner

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - French Jesuit priest, scientist, palaeontologist, philosopher, mystic, teacher

Thomas Berry - American Catholic priest, cultural historian, author

ORGANISATIONS

Institute of Collaborative Studies

Louisiana Channel

Melin Tregwynt

Guest artist CLAIRE BREWSTER joins painter and producer JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her practice via 'The Jeeves Collection' by P G Wodehouse. First published as a book by George Newnes in 1919, it tells of the daily interactions between a highly competent valet - Reginald Jeeves – who is referred to as Jeeves – and his wealthy, idle master - Bertie Wooster. Bertie and his chums are constantly getting into a pickle and Jeeves is constantly getting them out. Each story describes the interplay between dreaming and order in a timeless world.

Claire and Jillian talk about freedom, drifters, sprites, storytelling, menopause, dreamers, timelessness, tinkety tonk, interior design, unhelpful thinking, fantasy worlds, growing up, delayed gratification, art consultants, murmurations of starlings, Day of the Dead and relationships in a chocolate bar.

CLAIRE BREWSTER

clairebrewster.com

@claire_brewster

Claire Brewster Artist

ARTISTS + DESIGNERS + PERFORMERS

Dirk Bogard

Francisco de Zurbarán

Frida Khalo

Jonathan Cecil

Jorgé Canete

Kiki Smith

Stephen Fry

BOOKS + WRITERS

Enid Blyton 'The Magic Faraway Tree'

Harold Pinter

Lewis Caroll 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

P G Wodehouse 'My Man Jeeves'

Robin Maugham 'The Servant'

William Somerset Maugham

ART ORGANISATIONS + ASSOCIATES

Sigrid Kirk

Turps Banana

Guest artist QIAN QIAN joins independent curator, consultant and Reike instructor BECCA PELLY-FRY to discuss her work via 'Cosmicomics' by Italo Calvino. First published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968, Cosmicomics is a collection of short stories, mostly circling around a character called Qfwfq, which connect to real events in the history of the universe.

Becca and Qian Qian talk about parody, craters, peduncles, dinosaurs, fingernails, eclipses, tadpoles, surrealism, flipping, bitumen, seahorses, lentils, cartilage, honey, moulds, pollens, worms, resin, pepper, gravity, acrobatics , Galileo, astrophysics , labyrinth, apparatus, trilobites , embyro, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, gelatinous matter, mineral salts, combustion residue, scabby terrain, Big Bang , scientific theory, amazing creativity, deep time, human urgency , banal mundanity, Milky Way, judging others, zinc cliffs, moon milk, imaginative worlds, Chinese medicine, resolution changes, zombie movie Monty Python, watercolor paintings, Scottish countryside, scientific imagery, hero's journey , space bodies, celestial bodies, measuring devices, zen philosophy, black hole, sepia tint, spiritual rebirth, cosmic egg , world building, participatory art, energetic realm, spiritual journey, drinking whiskey, evolutionary biology, invisible radiation, ancient civilization, traditional Buddhism, dusk til dawn, the Italian resistance, grumpy old men, thousand armed being, flights of fancy, pillars of ice, reasoning and logic, stream of consciousness, cosmic know-it-all, climbing onto the moon, being dragged into the story, combining science and literature, the dream inside the dream inside the dream, and the light of near-death experiences.

QIAN QIAN

qianqianart.org

@ivyivymuami

'Fountains of Enceladus' Lychee One 30 April - 30 May 2026

'La Mariposa (Butterfly Woman)' Soho Revue 12 Feb - 15 March 2025

BECCA PELLY-FRY

beccapellyfry.com

@beccapf

'La Mariposa'

ARTISTS

Cecilia Charlton

Holly Stevenson

Lee Bontecue

Leonora Carrington

Marina Abramovic

Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis)

William Blake

BOOKS + FILM + WRITERS

Alejandro Jodorowsky 'The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky'

Alejandro Jodorowsky 'The Holy Mountain'

Clarissa Pinkola Estês 'Women Who Run with the Wolves'

Galileo Galilei

Italo Calvino 'If On a Winter's Night a Stranger'

Italo Calvino 'Invisible Cities'

Julio Cortázar 'Cronopios Famas'

Monty Python 'Life of Brian'

GALLERIES + EVENTS

Gallery 66

Lychee One

Open Art Folke

Soho Revue

Guest artist QIAN QIAN joins independent curator BECCA PELLY-FRY to discuss her work via 'Cosmicomics' by Italo Calvino.

QIAN QIAN

qianqianart.org

@ivyivymuami

'The Fountains of Enceladus'

BECCA PELLY-FRY

beccapellyfry.com

@beccapf

'La Mariposa'

ARTISTS

Cecilia Charlton

Holly Stevenson

Lee Bontecue

Leonora Carrington

Marina Abramovic

Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis)

William Blake

BOOKS + FILM + WRITERS

Alejandro Jodorowsky 'The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky'

Alejandro Jodorowsky 'The Holy Mountain'

Clarissa Pinkola Estês 'Women Who Run with the Wolves'

Galileo Galilei

Italo Calvino 'If On a Winter's Night a Stranger'

Italo Calvino 'Invisible Cities'

Julio Cortázar 'Cronopios Famas'

Monty Python 'Life of Brian'

GALLERIES + EVENTS

Gallery 66

Lychee One

Open Art Folke

Soho Revue

Guest artist HOLLY STEVENSON joins Freud Museum curator VANESSA BONI and JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Down Below' by Leonora Carrington. The original manuscript was "lost", so it was re-written via dictation and first published in 1944 in the surrealist journal VVV. Having fled from Nazi occupied France after her lover Max Ernst was arrested, the book describes first hand Carrington's traumatic confinement in a mental institution in Spain and her escape, eventually settling in Mexico City. It also connects directly with her 1940 painting of the same name.

We discuss hybrids, psychosis, illness, seamstresses, figurines, transference, trauma, worms, bedsheets, potency, alchemy, lucidity, fetishes, limbs, candy, autofiction, worms, visions, rebirth, Oedipus, transference, psychoanalysis, surrealism, netsuki, genius, creative coherence, brutal rape, civil war, role reversals, mythological beasts, defending insanity, hearing ghosts, colour shifts, inner transformation, wild tiger, symptomatic gut, dynamic unconscious, mythic underworld, female identity, symbolic structures, being celiac, the drive to create, Nazi occupied France, the surrealist imagination, borders of knowledge, structure of the unconscious, orange blossom poisoning, green as a magic colour, the studio and the couch, the Santander sketchbooks, and alternative ways of engaging with reality.

'Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal' curated by Vanessa Boni at Freud Museum 25 March - 10 August 2026

HOLLY STEVENSON

holly-stevenson.co.uk

@holly_stevenson

MAC Museum of Contemporary Art Gibellina City of Culture

The Sainsbury Centre

RAMM The Royal Albert Memorial in Exeter 3 Oct 2026 - 21 Feb 2027 'Living Labrynths: Art and Fungi'

'Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable' 14 May - 29 June 2025 including essays by Elizabeth Fullerton, Sharon Kivland and Emily Steer

'The Debate' Frieze 2023 curated by Fatos Üstek

'Another Mother' 2022 The Artist's Garden 

'Mother Art Prize' 2020

ARTISTS 

Daniel Buren

Dorothea Tanning

Leonora Carrington

Louise Bourgeois

Max Ernst

Tracey Emin

Salvador Dali

BOOKS + WRITERS + THEORISTS

Ali Smith

Professor Alyce Mahon 

Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism 'Book of Symbols'

Carl Jung

Jane McAdam Freud

Leonora Carrington 'The Debutante', 'The Hearing Trumpet', 'The Oval Lady'

Marina Warner

Mikhail Bulgakov 'The Master and Margharita'

Pierre Mabille 

Prophecy Cole 'The Shadow of the Second Mother'

Sigmund Freud 'The Interpretation of Dreams' 

GALLERIES + GALLERISTS + INSTITUTIONS

The Artists' Garden created by Claire Mander at thecolab.art support via change.org 'Long Live the Artist's Garden'

Faro Santander supported by Fundación Banco Santander

Freud Museum

National Gallery Edinburgh

Peggy Guggenheim

Tate Gallery

Guest artist SOPHIE VON HELLERMANN joins MARCELLE JOSEPH to discuss her work via 'Martyr!' by Kaveh Akbar.  Originally published in 2024 by Knopf, it portrays bereaved Iranian-American writer, searching for a reason to live.

Sophie and Marcelle talks about love, survival sacrifice, guilt, lightness, martyrdom, autofiction, resourcefulness, addiction, mythology, baroque, discovering, uncovering, subconscious, action painting, dark angels, lavender buds, raw pigments, suicidal ideation, time travel, hot stones, fleeting images, crimson flowers, catalyst for change, painting on the walls and walking hand in hand with Turner along the beach in Margate.

SOPHIE VON HELLERMANN

@sophievonhellerman

'Wabi-Sabi: Untangling the Meaning of Beauty' until 14 September 2026, Paul Smith Space, London 

Pilar Corrias Gallery London

'Sophie von Hellermann: Letters to a Young Painter' until 13 June, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin

'After a Dream' 30 April - 20 June, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

ARTISTS 

Caspar David Friedrich

Dieter Krieg

Francis Bacon

Henri Matisse

Marlene Dumas

JMW Turner

Paula Rego

Robert Kushner

Vincent Van Gogh

BOOKS + WRITERS

Arthur Conan Doyle 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'

Hafez

Virginia Woolf 'Mrs Delaware'

Rainer Maria Rilke 'Letters to a Young Poet', 'The Panther'

Rumi

Guest artist HAROUN HAYWARD

joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss his work via 'The Sea The Sea' by Iris Murdoch. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, it was first published in 1978 by Chatto & Windus, and most recently by Vintage Classics as part of Penguin Books.

The chaotic story centres around Charles Arrowby, a director, actor and playwright who has retired from his highly glamorous London life to become something of a hermit in a near isolated house by the sea. Just like in slapstick theatre he bumps up against a myriad of characters, including his buddhist cousin James, his childhood sweetheart Mary Hartley Fitch, ex lover Lizzie Scherer whose life he destabilises once again, and Lizzie’s ex lover before Charles - Peregrine Arbelow, the Irish drunk.

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Haroun and Jillian's conversation encompasses skateboarding, cancer, philosophy, thalassophobia, repetition, serpents, Japan, overthinking, identity, unclean, synesthesia, graffiti, enlightenment, hippiedom, apophenia, keystones, dog poo, constructivism, cascading failures, narrative honesty, suprematicism, magic realism, suppressing thought, apocalypse fish, landscape painting, self flagellation, vorticism, etching plates, herding cats, horror films, zombie formalism, lack of soul and poetry, and giving up painting to be a fry cook.

HAROUN HAYWARD

harounhayward.com

@harounhayward

'Path Through Trees' 30 May - 1 Nov 2026

ARTISTS + WORKS

Ben Nicholson

Ben Westerby

Bridget Riley

Carolin Walker

Chris Offili

Édouard Vuillard

Frankie Knuckles

Hans Memling

Hergé 'The Adventures of Tintin'

Hokusai 'The Great Wave'

Model 500

Paul Nash 'The Wanderer' 

Paul Nash 'Path through Trees'

Peter Doig

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Philip Guston 'I Paint What I Want to See'

Sonia Delaunay

Shezad Dawood

Ukiyo-e

Wassily Kandinsky

Wilhelmina Barnes Graham

Winifred Nicholson

WRITERS + BOOKS

Edward James

Gabriel García Márquez

Haruki Murakami

Iris Murdoch 'The Black Prince' + 'The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited' + 'The Severed Head' 

John Burnside 'Black Cat Bone' 

Kim Sloan 'Places of the Mind: British Watercolour Landscapes 1850-1950' 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tom McCarthy 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature'

William Shakespeare 'King Lear' + 'The Tempest'

ARTS ORGANISATIONS

Goldsmiths

Hales Gallery

Indigo Madder - Kritika Sharma

Kunsthistorisches Museum

Pallant House

Tate St Ives

Thamesside Studios

Turner Contemporary

West Dean College

Zwirner Gallery

Guest artists JENNET THOMAS and SALLY O'REILLY come together to discuss their work via the short story 'Critique' by Ben Marcus. Published in 2018 by Alfred A Knopf and Grant Books, it is one of 13 stories appearing in 'Notes from the Fog' which explore dysfunction, desolation and disconnection within a woundingly funny collision of art and reality.

'The Big Throw' at SET Social 23 April 2026

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"...narrative plot and how sticky and unpleasant it can be" JT

"The idea of just working in response to the infinity of the universe is appalling to me" SO'R

Sally and Jennet's conversation encompasses anti-plot, delirium, vertigo, maximalism, hermeticism, visitations and the grotesque. Yearning superpowers of persuasion, they go on and about carboot sales, ontological slippage, lemon sucking, deceptive loops, skewing language, twiddling knobs, automatic sterilisers, visually flamboyant, minor violences, constricting constraints, painting barcodes, slyly political, shifting rules, making knickerbockers, troubling reality, social reproductions, found objects, draped flesh, ecstatic technology talk, working in a factory, the pleasure of difficulty, a taste in the head, reality from the inside out, audience participation as part of the materials, weirdness coming into the living room, jumping to the whip of the ref, being wary of simplification and elegance, well made in a brutal violent sense at gunpoint, and a seal in mud with a lion's head.

JENNET THOMAS

jennetthomas.com

@jennetthomas

'School of Change' 2012

'All Suffering SOON TO END!' 2010

'Return of the Black Tower (after John Smith)' 2007

SALLY O'REILLY

sallyoreilly.org.uk

@manfredopenarms

'The Money Laundering Service' 2025

'Dog Shelves' 2024

'Where They Gather' 2022

'Estee Lauder Factory' 2022

'The Annual Retrieval' 2016

'The Virtues of Things' 2015

"I can't breath"

Eric Garner

George Floyd

ARTISTS

John Smith

Kit Downes

Klara Kofen

Leo Chadburn

Matt Rogers

Maz Murray

Simeon Barclay

WRITERS + BOOKS

Christine Brooke-Rose

Frieze magazine

M John Harrison

Muriel Spark

Russell Hoborn 'Riddley Walker'

Sally O'Reilly 'Help in Cucumbers'

Will Self

William Empson

FILM + TELEVISION

'Bedknobs and Boomsticks'

'Brimstone and Treacle'

Dennis Potter

Michael Kitchen

'The Terminator'

GALLERIES + ORGANISATIONS

Bandcamp

Horse Hospital

Matts Gallery

ICA Institute Contemporary Art

October House Records

Opera North

Royal Opera House

SET Social

SLG South London Gallery

Guest artist CARRIE MOYER

joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker. Published in 1962 by Houghton Mifflin (US) and Victor Gollancz (UK), most recently Daunt Books, with sympathetic tenderness and acerbic wit, it follows twin sisters Cassandra and Judith as they navigate Judith’s wedding to a very pleasant and capable young doctor.

The other key characters are their father, a retired philosophy professor who fancies a Brandy soda tipple, the ghost of their dead mother and their maternal grandmother.

Get in touch with us via [email protected]

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"it feels like all of the interesting innovations have been done by women painters in terms of abstraction"

Carrie and Jillian's conversation encompasses activism, wit, abandonment, confusion, family, ambivalence, agitpop, snarkiness, ambiguity, galaxy, queer, optical bliss, transitional places, menacing edge, geological time, mental illness, burying identity, utter distaste, ominous vibe and deadpan humour. They also talk about family as a cult, female body parts, destabilised vibration of colours, digging under conventions, being a lesbian in public, hard edge abstraction, vicious in a great beautiful smart way, wholesome hetro homemakers, abstract expressionism as a language and what the future is supposed to hold for you as a young woman.

CARRIE MOYER

'Always Venus, Never Mars' Pilar Corrias 23 Jan - 7 Mar 2026

carriemoyer.com

@carrie.moyer.studio

'Queer Abstraction' Des Moines Art Center by Curator Jared Ledesma 1 Jun - 8 Sep 2019

'Cave Dwellers who Paint Abstraction' 2025

'Radiant Granularity' 2025

'Art Glass' 2016

ARTISTS + CURATORS

Amy Sillman

Anish Kapoor

Béla Bartók

David Getsy

Dona Nelson

Elizabeth Murray

Frank Stella

Helen Frankenthaler

Jack Whitten '9.11.01' 2006 after Sep 11 2001

Judy Chicago

Laura Owens

Louise Fishman

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley 'Best Femmes Forever'

Morris Louis

Pat Steir

Rebecca Byrne

Rochelle Feinstein

Sabine Moritz

Stephen Meuller

William Butler Yeats

BOOKS + AUTHORS + FILM

Anna Burns 'The Milkman' narrator Brid Brennan

Arundhati Roy 'Mother Mary Comes to Me'

Audible

'Carrie Moyer' 2021 with contributions by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Katy Siegel, Joanna Dinah Fateman by Rizzoli Electa

Flann O'Brien 'The Third Policeman' narrator Jim Norton

J D Salinger 'Catcher in the Rye'

John Gray 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'

'The Ice Tower'

Travis Jeppesen 'Queer Abstraction (Or How to Be a Pervert with No Body) Some Notes Toward a Probability' Mousse magazine 2019

'Young Man with a Horn' 1950

UNIVERSITIES + ORGANISATIONS

Boston University

Daunt Books

Hunter College, New York

London Film Festivals

MoMA, New York 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger' 2025

Pratt Institute

From Episode 9, ALICE BROWNE chats with JILLIAN KNIPE about what she's been doing, reading and seeing, as well as her hopes for the year ahead. 

We delve into worship, floating, yellow, sainthood, caves, underwolds, pergatory, visceral visions, dark spaces, psychological potential, sharing dreams, self destruction, happy endings, vertical journeys, painting cracks, slapstick behaviour, maleable materials, early renaissance paintings and being a shit actress.

ALICE BROWNE

alicebrowne.com

@alicerbrowne

ARTISTS

Adam Hennessey

Ann Hamilton

Gabriela Giroletti

Giovanni de Paolo

Hannah Hughes

Hannah Tilson

Jennifer Caroline Campbell

Josephine Baker

Laura White

Lauren Godfrey

Lena Brazen

Lucy Mayes

Mikhail Karikis

Oona Grimes

Pia Pack

Zadie Xa

BOOKS + WRITERS

The Call of Cthulhu by H P Lovecraft

Cherry Smyth

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Drowned World by J G Ballard

Love Letter by George Saunders

The Natural Pigment Handbook by Lucy Mayes

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

ORGANISATIONS + COLLECTIVES

A P P E A R Artworks

Binder of Women

Bow Arts

Gillian Jason Gallery

Hypha Studios

National Gallery

Outpost Gallery

Pinnacle Climbing Club

Sainsbury Wing

Salts Mill 

Turner Prize