Fiona Glen

I see my practice as storytelling: an attempt to understand how we relate to our environments and everything with which we share them. Exploring different forms of being(s), I hope to inspire compassion and consideration – care for an unstill world that simmers with life.  

By unpicking narratives that go unnoticed – or giving narratives to unnoticed entities – I aim to explore cultural imaginaries and ethics, and how they impact our interactions with places, objects, and living beings. My research combines the investigative and emotional, I find my way by being attentive to landscapes, materials and creatures. Following their sprawling trails and weaving connections through the textural, linguistic and associative, I actively implicate my experience in work which takes shape between texts, audio and images.  

For two years, I have been chasing after cultural images of octopuses, and I brought my unruly discoveries together to create Cephalopodomania, my Final Major Project on the MA Writing programme. Feeling my way through characterisations of the octopus, I encountered political manipulation and radical activism, sexism and feminism, exploitation and empowerment. 

I am fascinated with science cultures, and the cultural codes and convictions that enter into these allegedly ‘rational’ or detached disciplines. In Cephalopodomania, I investigated the circumstances which led to scientific speculations that dolphins were literally aliens, while in Taken Lightly I traced the impassioned path of revolutionary metrologists who walked for seven years in pursuit of a perfectly egalitarian measure. 

I use writing to celebrate the irruptively bizarre beauty of the biological – how flies are born three times, and how sphagnum moss can help to heal war wounds. Concerned with the machinic and material as they wriggle into the living, I have written from the perspectives of oil being compressed and extracted, of a dam-monitoring algorithm authoring its own creation myth, and of chalk as an ephemeral incarnation of ancient microorganisms. In a short fiction piece, Pipe Down, my narrator considers the pained anatomy of their ailing house. My collaborative poetry project on fungi with Nina Hanz, Contagion Closer to Animal, troubles boundaries between living and non-living matter, consumer and consumed.