JAWS: Journal of Art & Writing - Current Issue

With her delicate constitution, her collection of bodily disorders and a predisposition to hysterical fits, Alice James was afflicted with all the symptoms of what the Victorian era labelled as invalidism – a vague and debilitating condition, usually synonymous with lasting weakness and seclusion within the bounds of the sickroom. And yet, James’s diary consistently evidences the dispersive force of her ‘thistle-down personality’. The image of chaotically scattered seeds undercuts the assumptions of isolation and immobility that often underlie descriptions of chronic illness in the nineteenth century. Examining how James’s use of personal pronouns revitalizes (dis)connections between the diarist and the world, this article investigates the volatile quality of selfhood in her diary and letters. In creating an airy subject, wavering between cohesion and dissemination, her writings challenge the notion of the invalid as an irrevocably stationary figure and renegotiate the representations of fragility with which feminine illness is typically associated.

This article analyses the ethical implications that come with writing in the confessional genre. Rosalind Coward, journalist and writer, discussed the moral issues of the confessional in her work, specifically in her 2013 book Speaking Personally: The Rise of Subjective and Confessional Journalism. Additionally, there have been several case studies in which journalists such as Coward have had issues when exploring personal experiences via a public lens. Using the essence of Coward’s research, alongside case studies drawn from recent examples where the use of confessional journalism has generated controversy, one is able to evaluate the interpersonal, legal and emotional challenges caused by confessional writing. It is also possible to posit the idea that personal writing does not conform to traditional journalistic ethics, and thus is in danger of being an unsustainable and unstable mode of journalistic writing.

Fashion curation in museum and heritage contexts often privileges intactness and the appearance of perfection in display objects. Whereas the physical state of objects shapes the stories that can be drawn from their display, this article argues for an expansive approach to curation, drawn from precedents in art curation and heritage studies, that incorporates visibly decaying and/or deteriorated materials. Curating decay broadens and complicates the narratives presented through practices of fashion curation. Incorporating heritage and cultural studies, archaeology, object analysis and the execution of research workshops and critical conservation/curation, this research reflects upon the generative power of decay and argues for its application to fashion curation to produce new avenues for creative work and narrative construction.

Drawing from Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s analysis of the gothic and proposal for reparative reading, this article takes an artwork by the artist Tai Shani (b. 1976) and reads it in tandem with philosopher Luce Irigaray’s response to the work of twentieth-century artist, Unica Zürn (1916–70). Through this pairing, the article proposes an approach to both Irigaray and Shani’s works from which can be created a feminist art practice as composed of gaps, and forces that move across them.

Folly | Façade explores contradictions inherent within urban environments shaped by capitalism, interrogating tensions between functionality and illusion, structure and decay. Grounded in the embodied experience of walking alone in the city, the exhibition follows the perspective of the flâneuse, drawing on Feminist Punk and Arte Povera, to examine the material and emotional landscapes of urban life. Polaroids and ephemeral sculptural installations highlight precariousness, power and façades that mask instability. Through architectural forms or follies that relate to the gendered body, the work here critiques how we navigate public space, exposing the constraints imposed by capitalist design. The interplay of light and dark space within the exhibition reflects the city’s circadian rhythm, uncovering what is hidden beneath its glossy exterior. Folly | Façade: Navigating Contradictions of Urban Experience through the Gendered Body walks you through the exhibition, like a guided tour, inviting viewers and readers to consider urban space not as neutral, but as a site of struggle and reappropriation, where identity, emotion and resistance are embedded.

This article examines Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 feature film Certain Women (2016) to explore how the film’s form articulates themes of loneliness, lack of agency and a fading sense of community within a postmodern context. Through the lives of Laura, Gina, Jamie and Beth, the film reveals fragile human bonds shaped by gender imbalance, class, race and sexuality. Reichardt’s narrative and cinematic approach emphasize an ethics and politics of fragility, with precarious links within a larger inferred context defining narrative development. The film situates community as a tenuous set of connections born from the insecurities of modern society, reflecting resistance amid adversity. Through mise en scène, precise camera work, and an intrinsically cinematic temporality, Reichardt portrays a world in flux, where women’s labour underscores the fragility of interpersonal and systemic bonds. Yet, these perilous connections suggest paths for renewal and agency even in uncertain times.

This article analyses the concepts of patriarchy and fragility as presented in Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Drawing from bell hooks’s theories on masculinity in The Will to Change, fragility is understood as a fundamental underside to the performance of domination in patriarchal identity. After analysing the aggressive yet insecure behaviours of the novel’s secondary male characters, I focus on Connell, whose sensitivity has been embraced in popular culture as contributing to new forms of masculinity. I argue it is through him that Rooney most thoroughly explores the damaging persistence of patriarchal ideology in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Literary form, particularly free indirect style, is seen to capture the fragility of his subjectivity in relation to the hegemonic order of patriarchy. I examine his (limited) passage from compartmentalization, which results in toxic secrecy with Marianne, towards integrity, a state which is inverse to, yet partially manifests out of, fragility.

This critical reflection attaches personal post-pandemic perspectives to Yasmin David’s Weather Diaries (c.2008) in which the painter focuses on her observations from the near and middle distance in relation to nature and weather, revealing the impact that Devon’s light can have on the psyche, and perception. I add to this the subjective ratios of energy which also reflect on the relationship between my mother’s way of life and myself as a witness shaped by her invisible disabilities as this appears in my film Time:Distance (2012). Within the article I draw on the title of my film and punctate the text with David’s handwritten observations. Through autobiographical pairing – ‘near-by’ each other in place and concept – I critique painterly traditions representing English landscapes, framing them as learned ways of seeing. Using Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, I argue that pictorial ideas relating to the ecstatic can align with a distancing of the viewer; I re-contextualize these exquisite, temporal readings of light, and the artist’s framing of embodied, close-up views, as within the experience of ill health, helping me outline what psycho-rurality could mean. Thirteen years after making my film, I discuss the shift in context that enables me to re-frame the psycho-rurality of my film as particular and personal, rather than attending to rurality as mythic and distant. Using ‘interdependence’ – a state tied up in ecological and mother–daughter relationships – as an approach to mapping the range of ideas in this text, I make a case for the ‘near-by’ of Weather Diaries and Time:Distance to designate ways in which ecology, personal horizon and physical limitation impress on contemporary readings of landscape.