Aiden Armstrong

Aiden Armstrong's vibrantly trashy canvases re-situate the traditions of landscape and portrait painting into surreal fantastical worlds. At once playful and disturbing these impossible compositions juxtapose the uncanny with the banal leaving the viewer to wonder what is dream and what is real in these carnivalesque creations.

About the Artist

Aiden Armstrong (b. 1989, London, UK) is a recent graduate of The August Academy of Fine Art, Rome. Recent solo shows include Pineapple Pleasures at Followers Gallery, London (2018) and Eruptions at Volcano Gallery, Amsterdam (2017). Selected group exhibitions include You Can Stay at Liminal Fictions Project Space, London (2018) and Boldly Go at Split Infinitive Gallery, Glasgow (2016). Aiden Armstrong is currently undertaking a residency at Fondation Flora, France with a solo exhibition Lemon Fantasies opening at the icing room in 2019.

Fox clout

Fox Clout is a European writer working with text in an expanded way. Clout was raised in diverse European landscapes by an academically minded and artistically active family. After graduating from an established university Clout spent their formative years travelling and honing their observation and writing skills. Clout is the author of genre-evading, non-compromising and delightfully witty works of fiction: What do you call a man with no shins?, For the safety and comfort of conventional people, Insecurities of the weak, Everybody’s nightmares and other lies. Instagram influencer, Clout is an important voice tuned in to the beat of the contemporary world.

AP Flayme

AP Flayme’s first collection The Pirate of the Seas was shortlisted for the Albert Tenby prize for poetry (2011), and highly commended in the Wishart Awards (2011). It draws on Flayme’s experience travelling between Orkney, Cadiz and Tangiers to research the Great Skua, a predatory bird known as the Pirate of the Seas.

In 2012 Flayme published The Olympians, a poetry cycle to mark the changing habits of 325 migrating bird species, which was awarded the prestigious Jeremy Crate Award for literary performance.

Flayme’s latest project addresses the local and global histories of migration across continents, putting the so-called ‘migration crisis’ into perspective. He describes it as a life’s work, although extracts of On Movement have been published by Canizarro Editions, performed at the Glasgow Triennial and broadcast as a special all-night programme by Denmark’s Radio International. A collection from Hoven Press is on its way. 

Flayme’s poetry, essays and literary non-fiction are widely published around the world, incuding by The Atlanticist, The Glasgow Times and The New York Chronicle. She is a regular columnist for the Boston-based International Review. Flayme is currently a Research Fellow in Literary Misadventure at University College, Delft, where he teaches interdisciplinary composition. 

Jendon ray fox

Fox is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant voices in contemporary arts and social practices. Recognised as a constructor, diffuser, spectacular elaborator and a singular future for body based practices, she is an oracle of sorts. Her extravagant insights into the nature of energies between things is at least partly rooted in her early days of axolotl breeding in downtown Shanghai. More recently, her application of bitcoin encryptology to ceramic motion and fleshy bollard worlds has influenced social policy in three countries.

Her works create quixotic and edifying rifts in the matrices of assumption that heave down on our everyday lives. Last year saw the culmination of FyWrmWry, a project that applied the social dynamics of bees to organic choreographic structures that were actualised, then repealed, by people in a range of places including art galleries, immigrant detention centres and the landscape of Cappadocia. To speak of form in relation to Fox’s works is to deny how those works blur the edges of the very notion of form. Her works are proposals for being.

In 2010 a group of individuals who had met operating her work ‘Empty3 Open17 Engaged91’ came together to articulate and note what has since become informally known as the Fox Technique. This technique involves engaging in a constantly evolving range of physical and verbal social greetings that have effectively created a new mode of human understanding.

Art critic Pamela Crisp has stated that “with Jen art is people. She asks that you start with art, but never finish. That you make space for those fresh surges of perception and connection on every lunch break.”

Gaylord

Gaylord’s haunting installations draw on themes universally present in fairy tales and myths. His compositions, often life-sized dolls, express polarities such as glamour and destitution, pleasure and suffering. Blending autobiographical material and fantasy, his work actively blurs the line between fact and fiction. Signing with the mononym Gaylord, (born Gabriel-Auguste Gaillard), his work critiques consumerism, celebrity and disposability. He employs disappearing skills such as embroidery, wig-making, wood-carving and taxidermy, and includes antique fabrics discovered in flea markets or rubbish bins. His dolls have been described as “visual explorations of subconscious transexual desires,” “inner shadows of his social persona,” or “full-body death masks, marking the point in the hero’s journey where the transition from death to rebirth takes place.” Gaylord’s work invites the viewer to engage with their own projections, personal mythology, fear and disgust.

Laurel T Gray

Laurel T Gray is a multi disciplinary artist whose work has spanned more than two decades of eclectic and mesmerising artwork. Gray began her filmmaking career as a member of the punk collective ‘Softcell’ which brought her to the forefront of the avant grade film scene. Her first short film ‘Kalt’ was selected for the Greenwich award in 2005 and in 2006 she began a 5 year project writing, filming and directing her first feature film ‘Maryam’. Shot around the globe in 17 different countries, ‘Maryam has achieved the impossible. By capturing the complicated origins of religious extremism, the love story of a missionary and a young man coming of age in Zimbabwe is given a weight and context that fills you with rage and longing.’ Heist Magazine. In 2014 Gray’s hugely controversial 12 part series ‘Freetown’ aired on HMO, sparking national debate on the history of slavery. An activist for life Gray’s most recent project ‘A Room for no-one’ cemented her position as one of the most politically astute artists working in the world today.

my king

My (pronounced ‘Mi’) King, cannot be defined by form or genre. King’s work embodies the philosophy of being and the body in place. King, who grew up in a travelling circus, joined anti-war anarcho-punk band The Argentinas in her teens (as Tina Strums) before becoming a key player in the UK’s avant-film movement. She creates visually lush, politically complex story-works. Best known for her Coffee Stops series of analogue/digital body-based performative interventions, she creates site specific pieces in which the public play an integral part, an approach experienced by thousands during their daily commute as they (unknowingly) join in Texts Piece, winner of the 2016 Keld Prize. Revisiting her musical background, Coffee Stops latest iteration is Song Stops, a series of guerrilla gigs in public/private spaces. King is currently writing a memoir which she says will not specifically reference any past personas.

Marcel.le b kuntz

Marcel.le B. Kuntz is a conceptual artist for whom “the world provides the terrain for their extended practice”. Kuntz doesn’t work with any particular medium but with time (duration), space (land) and matter (weather and beings). Their work is set to explore the conditions of possibility of art and to further challenge the ontological, political, economic and ecological limitations of life on this planet. After a 3 year-long apprenticeship as a shoe cobbler in Northern Italy, Marcel.le B. Kuntz went on to train as an architect in Lausanne. A Doctor in Philosophy from the University of La Sorbonne (with a thesis dedicated to the impact of Plato’s allegory of the cave on Land Art and ecological thinking), the artist also holds an MA in macroeconomics from LSE.

Although the nationality of the artist is not known, Marcel.le B. Kuntz speaks English, French and German (and writes fluent Latin). Kuntz’s only travels on foot, by train or by boat. “While Kuntz’s artwork remains elusive and mysterious, it spirals around you and wraps itself around you until you can’t stop thinking about it. Their work creates tricks on the mind and eye, invoking a feeling of awe that’s rare in contemporary art. You breathe differently, you stand in a different way, you start paying attention to things you’ve never notice before. Once experienced, you can never quite forget Kuntz’s work.”

Peter Lingo, The New York Chronicles

Marcel.le B.Kuntz do not sell their art: they either show it (through performances, exhibitions and publications) or they give it away.

Dot mansell rive (DMR) 1952-2018

Dot Mansell Rive (DMR) was a conceptual artist working in the medium of theatre. Born into a fishing community, as a child she moved into police protection when a family member – later murdered - was chief witness in a drug smuggling trial. Dot wrote of her realisation that all life, memory, every human relation involved performance. Her artistic practice did not begin in earnest until her fifties, with her breakthrough piece Swordfish (2003), based on the fact that when harpooned, swordfish dive so fast they impale their swords into the ocean bottom up to their eyes. Over 25 years as an artist and conceptual theatre-maker she would return to seafaring mythology repeatedly.

Throughout her career, Dot Rive created a series of ground-breaking longterm narrative enactments unlike anything else in theatre. To be devised and re-enacted by families or communities, often through decades, whereby each generation reinterprets scenes from their antecedents, these have evolved into an international dramatic participatory representation of life, death, climate change and migration.

In 2013 Dot embarked upon LevenCyclus a cycle of revolutionary theatrical iterations mapping the minutiae of community experience. Produced in the form of one-page ‘prescriptions’ for community actions, Future Canon After All This (materials for new theatre) will have been performed worldwide by 2023. There is a particular poignancy that her Foundation continues her final project’s creative process after her death.

Clyd McGregor

Born in 1972 to an affluent Edinburgh family, Clyd McGregor notoriously tore her way through the dance scene in her teens and twenties and started her career as the precocious dance-music journalist McClyde. Now happily married to a New York painter and living in Brooklyn, she’s recently received a number of awards for a collection of essays on friendship, staged two performance texts and is finishing her novella Chinchilla – based on her time living on the south coast of England.

“McGregor’s essays on friendship are a startlingly-careful debut from someone already established as a very particular voice on the music scene. She investigates the historic and contemporary roles of friendship while telling deeply personal stories of love and loss from across her – in particular – female friendships. It is a beautiful and loving collection and a huge contrast to her previous spikey incarnation as McClyde”

Mackenzie Creative Non-Fiction Award 2018

August moon

August Moon (b. 1967, London), is an author and activist. Moon’s first collection Prism won the Merlyn Joyce New Writing Prize. Moon comes from a story-telling tradition and a background in classical scholarship. Recent works include a collection of lenticular poetry, Islands/Histories, and Protein and Salt, which issues an invitation to become part of a living archive by donating a blood sample for research purposes. Moon’s childhood home, subject of long-poem Last night in the kitchen at the August Moon, recently fell victim to the vicious austerity programme that Moon documents in the political tract-poem Permanently Closed, winner of the Sentence Prize for Literature. Moon is Ambassador for Experiential Forms for Littoral on the Lake and visiting Professor at the Sanpo Centre of Hybrid Media. Moon’s experimental novel Justine at four in the morning is widely regarded as a love letter to Moon’s collaborator My King.

My MOON

My (pronounced My) Moon is the collective name used by My King and August Moon. My Moon operates outside art world tropes and structures, seeking to disrupt and change by harnessing non-hierarchal social forms. My Moon’s first collaboration was based around the numberTwelve - it references ancient measurement systems based on the human form and comprises twelve chapters, twelve movements and takes place over a calendar year. This work is ongoing.

My Moon’s projects include: Twelve Winds: Willy Willy, Chinook, Berg, Bora, Sirocco, Khamsin, Haboob, Harmattan, Brickfielder, Trades, Westerlies, Roaring Forties, (work for text, film, voice); Atlanders - a filmed poem cycle about a sense of place; A’lLethe, a retreat and residency programme where artists come to share food and ideas, to create, sleep, talk and walk in nature. My Moon is also the instigator of the Willing Foundation which provides opportunities for artists to reinterpret and re-invigorate the world.

Arlo t ray

Arlo T Ray is known for his formal inventiveness, working across disciplines and embracing whatever mediums and materials each new work demands. Ray’s visual and conceptual practice bears the marks of a unique trajectory, from a nomadic childhood spent living in Denmark, Belgium, Germany and Greece, a training in engineering and political science, and an early career in photography, a love instilled by his photographer mother.

Of a generation of artists with no formal arts training, Ray is one of the most consistently surprising. His 2010 work ‘Darkroom’ brought him international acclaim, and since then he has produced immersive, experiential and provocative works that have been shown in Basel, New York, Vienna, London, Venice, Sydney and Cape Town. The satisfying conceptual simplicity of his works belies an often visceral affective impact. Politics and ethics are always a primary concern, as is a critical questioning of the position of the human maker and spectator.

Vex Raven

A cross between a performance maker, landscape designer and conceptual artist, Vex Raven is often described as a ‘choreographer of situations’. Raven’s works are conceived as series of relentless processual invitations that activate communities and landscapes battling poverty and political and environmental crises.

Raven’s Made In series (since 2005) is described as ‘a meticulously site-specific masterpiece shedding light on the unseen corners of everyday life’ by Milos Garesky (Arts Review). Made In is a series of twelve large scale live installations ‘Made In’ Jabalia Camp (Palestine), Rocinha favela (Brazil), Portuondo neighbourhood AKA the ghetto (Santiago de Cuba), Nagda (India) and other areas affected by humanitarian and environmental crises.

Raven has refused several major awards in art and culture with a non-acceptance speech criticising the influence of the awarding institutions on controversial and devastating political and environmental decisions. The non-acceptance speeches are now considered another series in Raven’s oeuvre. From submerging houses in water (Submerge, 1998 - 2008) to physically moving a million dollars (Transfer since 2012) and designing a wall that separates east and west Tel Aviv (ongoing), Raven’s artworks are audacious, daring and thought provoking.

Vincent rive

Vincent Rive is a British author of supernatural and science fiction, horror and suspense. Based in Berlin and South-West France, he writes novels primarily in German and short fiction in French, sometimes under the name Lenty Rivière. The author of four novels and over 100 short stories, his literary accolades include the Achtung Gespensterpreis, Chicago Suspense Award, and the Ordre des Belles Lettres. In a rare early interview with the Süddeutsche Presse he characterised his near-obsession with privacy as the desire to avoid fame at all costs in order to remain free to write myths which enter the bloodstream.  When not writing he enjoys the company of friends, loud music, and silence.

nick wolf

Nick Wolf is an enfant terrible of the literary scene - a novelist, essayist, playwright and experimental poet - his work cuts across genres, and redefines the semiotic boundaries of the written word. 

Nick’s first novel was called The Cut and was written after he spent six months travelling South America, accompanied only by a small backpack that once belonged to his grandfather.  The resulting novel was a fictional recreation of this journey, a seminal text in the auto fiction genre - starring a character named “Nick” constantly caught at a crossroads between kinship and voyeurism - a dynamic that literary critic Angus Riley said, “contributed to travel writing as a genre the same way a tornado contributes to a teacup.”  Nick won the Mann Ray prize for this first novel, along with being nominated for the Emissary Luminaries Committee.

Since then, Nick’s work has cut across genres, always united by a bold curiosity and muscularity of form.  His second, highly personal novel, “Love in a Red Country” was named as one of the top 10 books to read before you die by Pret Magazine.  The New York Chronicle called him “An uncompromising pioneer of the English language.”  He holds honorary doctorates from three separate universities, and in 2016 he was awarded a Chekhov Genius Grant.

Download a section from Wolf's correspondence with his editor Lisa Thorpe