Bryony Bodimeade
About
I am a freelance art writer and editor currently based in London. I received a BA in Painting from Wimbledon College of Art in 2013. In 2018-2020 I co-edited two books: 'Attention', an anthology of writing by RCA students, and 'Dust sheet embroidered snow', a collection of artist's writing, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name. I have co-curated a number of exhibitions, including Dust sheet embroidered snow, Project Gallery, Arundel (2019), Smoke Gets in Your Eye, Rural BAES, Near Lewes (2018) and Cavity, pop-up show, Nairobi (2017).
Degree Details
Statement
I am interested in articulations of relations, of the effects of particular circumstances, materials and dynamics on the possibilities of doing, thinking, being, feeling. I am interested in what writing can do to create circumstances, to open up, bring together, give shape, generate ground. To constellate physical and non-physical links between subjects in tension. Currently: representations in art, cinema and writing of relationships between people and animals: how these relate to geo-political histories, and might present ways of thinking about what family can be.
Pieces I have written during this course have included an essay about the poetics of opacity and the conjuring of an emotional history of landscape in Zarina Bhimji’s film Jangbar, and an interview with Michael Armitage in which we discussed intimate and radical gestures in the painting of animals. I have also written about a playground and a Salvation Army playgroup, looking within these sites for ways to write inbetween structures and material and feeling.
Presented on this page are a number of extracts from my Final Major Project, 'If calves do cry,' - a 12,000 word two-part text comprising of a story, 'The Flood', and an essay, 'A Manual of Husbandry and Sentiment' - as well as a short story called 'Richie'.
If calves do cry: The Flood
‘If calves do cry,’ is a two-part text: a story about a flood in 2000 in which many farm animals were drowned and an essay tracing a kind of lineage of affect in husbandry. The essay, called ‘A Manual of Husbandry and Sentiment’, moves between sixteenth century English agricultural writings and history; sociological and philosophical research into contemporary farming relationships; and feminist materialism and care theory, to explore the relational ethics, structural conditions, embodied doings and shape of feeling that can be found within the notion of husbandry. The flood narrative pays close attention to touch, proximity and perception, and centres around an act of collective involvement where, for a brief, tragic yet transformative moment, ways of relating and arranging are changed. Together, in the slip between husbandry and sentiment, the two texts work on feeling. By thinking about articulation, cultivation, suppression and exchange of feeling, about whose (who’s) feeling, they attempt to write in a way which is resistive to discourses steeped in both sentimental pastoral conservatism, and sentiment-denying logics of extractive productionism, and to search instead for different kinds of feelings and effects.
Medium: Text
Size: Long read
If calves do cry: A Manual of Husbandry and Sentiment
‘If calves do cry,’ is a two-part text: a story about a flood in 2000 in which many farm animals were drowned and an essay tracing a kind of lineage of affect in husbandry. The essay, called ‘A Manual of Husbandry and Sentiment’, moves between sixteenth century English agricultural writings and history; sociological and philosophical research into contemporary farming relationships; and feminist materialism and care theory, to explore the relational ethics, structural conditions, embodied doings and shape of feeling that can be found within the notion of husbandry. The flood narrative pays close attention to touch, proximity and perception, and centres around an act of collective involvement where, for a brief, tragic yet transformative moment, ways of relating and arranging are changed. Together, in the slip between husbandry and sentiment, the two texts work on feeling. By thinking about articulation, cultivation, suppression and exchange of feeling, about whose (who’s) feeling, they attempt to write in a way which is resistive to discourses steeped in both sentimental pastoral conservatism, and sentiment-denying logics of extractive productionism, and to search instead for different kinds of feelings and effects.
Medium: Text
Size: Long read
Richie
‘Richie’ is a short, strange story about a cat, in a place, at a time. It was published in 'NOIT - 5: bodies as in buildings', which features a collection of essays, short prose and images written and edited by RCA Writing students as part of a collaborative project with Flat Time House. Illustration by Lucy Swan. Publication design by Emily Schofield.
Medium: Text
Size: Short read