I’d like artists and writers to have more money and time, but –while we don’t– I think we can imagine different futures by enacting them in temporary ways.
– Anna Kate Blair
Sticky Teeth’s micro-interviews ft. words on the intersection of arts and writing.
For this sticky teeth micro-interview, I chatted with Anna Kate Blair on the good and bad in between facets of art, writing, and time. She touches on her concerns over the lack of resources for the writing process, and also on history, capitalism and imagining alternative futures for creativity.
xx Tahney
Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa based in Naarm.
Her work has appeared in Cordite, Slow Canoe, Landfall, Archer, Reckoning, The Big Issue’s Fiction Edition, Meanjin, Good Weekend and other places. She holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, The Modern, was published by Scribner in September 2023.
Tahney: When you think of issues that surround art and writing, what comes up for you?
Who do you love working between art and writing?
A quote from any of them?
I had never wondered how it would feel to walk into the enveloped mouth of a giant rose, but now I did. I read on a placard that Georgia O’Keeffe had always denied that her flowers were images of vulvas. Had Georgia O’Keeffe been a bimbo? A person who plays games with what they do and don’t know in order to get what they want. I wondered what had happened to all the bimbos and where they had gone. Maybe they’d dyed their hair back to brown and become CEOs.
Give yourself a shout-out! Fav project? And most recent?
My favourite thing I’ve ever created was an essay-installation entitled Notes Toward a Subjective History of Honey at Arts, Letters and Numbers in New York in 2018. It was inspired by a bag of honeycomb shards I found in a closet. I explored honey in history, mythology, and my own life, examining my relationship to Aotearoa in childhood and after my mother’s death.
It consisted of sixty-three pieces of writing that could be read in any order, displayed on the walls of a room alongside objects I made that explored the essay’s reference points in other ways: large woollen clouds with beaded honey raining from them; an arrow sculpted from beeswax; small honey and bay leaf cakes that followed an ancient Greek recipe that I linked to the Apollo and Daphne myth; hand-drawn maps; newspaper clippings; the bag of honeycomb that sparked the project.
There are some images and excerpts in the recesses of the internet and the text (albeit arranged in a linear format) was later published in an anthology, but it was the combination of text and objects, the way in which the essay could be read in many formations and required its audience to stand, to move, to shuffle around one another, surrounded by the piece, that felt particularly special.
I loved the way that people responded to it; it provoked a certain kind of intimacy. I wish I could create essay-installations along these lines more frequently.
The most recent (major) thing I’ve released is my first novel, The Modern, which Scribner published in September 2023. It’s about modern art, bisexuality and the forest.
Any other writing you’d like to reccomend?
More on Anna Kate Blair here.
Interview by Tahney Fosdike.
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