A collection of intensities and moods. Scattering items around town. Self-contradictory. Barely clad, unapologetically flippant. Errant, off-the-shoulder nonchalance. Naïve. Too fast, too slow. Ripped stockings and transparent scarves. Homespun plays and self-published pamphlets. Grazing your knees. Cutting your hair with blunt kitchen scissors. A collection of silver spoons. A tiny bit bossy. Backless leotards. Overripe pears. A itinerant bookshelf. Performances and readings by candlelight. Edna’s is about gathering in the evanescent practice of love.

 

Pleasures by Toni at No End Gallery, Johannesburg. November 2024

Toni is the atmosphere between Io Makandal and Samantha McCulloch. Over the past decade they have co-created a number of visual and performative inquiries into the relationship between matter, spatial discourse, friendship and intimacy. Their latest project Pleasures (2024-ongoing) will be debuted in the Flowers exhibition with an installation that sets the stage for a series of performances exploring the political and social role of friendship and emotional in the organisation of society.

The Reunion hosted by Edna’s and Polly Wright, Brighton. October 2024

Mary’s Shop, Jonathan F. Kugel Gallery, Brussels, October 2024

Of manners and tone

Muriel Spark’s novel of manners, The Finishing School (2004) is the inspiration for Mary’s Shop, hosted by Edna’s in Brussels. College Sunrise is “a vaguely disreputable” school in Switzerland, presided over by an envious novelist, Rowland Mahler, who becomes obsessed with one of his prodigious students, Chris Wiley. In the novel’s opening scene, Rowland instructs his creative writing class on setting a scene, “You have to set your scene either in reality or in imagination, Rowland says, “For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can't see across the lake, it's too misty." The tone of the novel is produced by way of what’s concealed in mist, as much as what can be concretely described and figured in words.

Similarly obscured and barely there, is the minor character and titular figure for Mary’s Shop and Sean Wehle’s series of letters, written to me between August and October of 2024. Mary is the princess of an unnamed country, “whose ambition was to open a shop and sell ceramics and transparent scarves.” When Sean first mentioned Mary to me, I was intrigued. You don’t learn anything further about Mary or her shop in the novel and so I asked Sean whether he’d be interested in exploring her character arc. A Sparkian atmosphere is present in the performances and readings featured in Mary’s Shop. Enchanting on first impression, disconcerting on second. A tone that is made by way of what’s not told, described and present, but what is implied, evoked, gestured toward and satirised.

“When you finish at College Sunrise you should be really and truly finished,” Nina instructs the students, “like the finish on a rare piece of furniture.” “Polished off.” The opposite is the case, of course. This is a novel about the creative process. A lively engagement with the space between art and life is what Rowland Mahler aspires to, but can only emulate. This joie de vivre is also what he begrudgingly recognises in the precocious, Chris. The artists, performers and writers in Mary’s Shop refuse to be polished, preferring to respond spontaneously, affectively, fearlessly and quickly. Here, plot is both elaborate and gauzy, labyrinthine as a spider’s web, transparent as Mary’s scarves.