Octavia Bright: Heathcliff, It’s Me

This July SHELL LIKE curators Amy Pettifer and Jennifer Boyd present a show by Octavia Bright titled Heathcliff, It’s Me continuing their take over of the programming of exhibiting artists at ilyd.

Heathcliff, It’s Me presents the internal monologue of a female subject self-saturated in the imagery and ideals of gothic literary romance. The narrative moves with eerie calm between the surreal and the mundane, generating a wormy, dewy green undercurrent of desire that appears to fuel a synthesis between body and earth. It is a bright, rolling, morning song, set slightly on edge; its arms outstretched – ready to plunge into sensory excess and the wildest parts of nature.

The text was originally published on Octavia’s blog Lobsters For Liberty in 2016 and was commissioned as an audio work in collaboration with SHELL LIKE for The Mouth Is a Fossil Bog Buried And Glowing Blue. First presented at Sidney Cooper Gallery in October 2017, as part of Shell Lit Siambr, a solo exhibition by Bethan Lloyd Worthington.

Octavia Bright is a London-based writer and academic. Working across disciplines, she has written fiction, criticism, and poetry for a variety of publications including Momma Tried, ROADFEMME, hotdog, The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Somesuch Stories, AnOther Magazine, The Pigeonhole, Feminist Temporalities, and Orlando. She holds a PhD from UCL, where her research focused on hysteria and desire, and she recently wrote the libretto for the song cycle We Phoenician Sailors (with composer Freya Waley-Cohen). Octavia also co-hosts Literary Friction, a literary talk show on NTS Radio, and is currently developing The Other Side of the Sea, a one-woman opera written with and for soprano Héloïse Werner.

Kilde: ilyd