Edwina Preston’s Bad Art Mother (2022) is a narrative about motherhood leading to an artist’s withdrawal from the arts industry and vice versa. Veda, an ambivalent housewife and zealous poet in 1960s Melbourne, grants legal guardianship of her young son to a wealthy couple, the Parishes, to allow her more time to write. As implied by the title, this exchange isn’t so simple. She’s a complex figure in a world where sexism and artistic precarity overlap, and motherhood and creative labour remain mutually exclusive. The book is a historical mediation that endures: even if doors look open, gendered expectations still often freeze women out of full participation and recognition in the arts.

At the onset of a 5-year renovation-slash-asbestos-removal project, Centre Pompidou has been pumping out marketing about the closure while, in equal measure, plastering metro stations with posters promoting the latest programming. Are they open or not?

The career of Melbourne-born Carol Jerrems (1949–1980) was short-lived, leaving one wondering what she might have achieved if she had lived beyond thirty years of age. Yet these anxieties subside knowing what trailed her untimely death: a potent legacy that has only intensified over time.

In the days before the release of The Magic Money Tree with Blue Coat Press, I interviewed Mackay about her process of collaboration and nuanced storytelling as a lens to look at widespread poverty and the cost of living crisis in the UK today.