Writing (MA)
Hattie Gibson
I am a writer and editor currently based in London, born in Wales. Prior to studying at the Royal College of Art, I lived in Berlin where I worked on projects like the Berlin Bookshop Map (published by Argobooks, 2018), and for Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin. Most recently, I co-edited NOIT—5: bodies as in buildings (published by the Royal College of Art, 2019), a collection of work by students of the MA Writing programme. I received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Mixed Media from the University of Westminster in 2015.
Slipperiness, strands and fragments, the permeable, illness, its images—resist. Stitch. Make from mutation, migration—.
I'm interested in nonlinear modes of making through language, bodies and plants. I write about too much connection and objects like: trash, weeds, pests, mutants, clots, tumours and other forms of excess. My writing is fixed on objects crossing geographies, bodies, pages, screens; at transient sites where new things grow from the seams.
Through projects formed out of the MA Writing programme, I have developed ideas of entanglement, of living and experiencing illness in labour systems, and the language that surrounds medication, treatment, and curing. I also keep coming back to discarded land, or land once intrinsic to the upkeep of bodies—particularly through my research into striking miners at the National Eisteddfod of 1984, and the deep-rooted link between a working Welsh language and working Welsh land.
My final major project ANGI- is a textual exploration into these webs of places, bodies and technologies. It flows between occlusion and discovery, tourism and agency, offering sites for the mess that occurs when things keep growing, when excess can flourish. To draw from my past pieces written at the Royal College of Art, ANGI- is the accumulation of ideas on the structure of health, its metaphors, and ways to seep through and reach out of its image—one that's esteemed, productive, coded—as a form of refusal. I am interested in how the upkeep of these images has become personal, and how we can think together about its language, form new ways of seeing and more ways of caring.
ANGI- scan
ANGI- scan
ANGI- scan
ANGI- scan
Angi- is a root that relates to vessels and cavities of the body, a prefix for nonlinear growth—a bag, a tuber from which roots reach out, stretch. From these strands corruption and seduction become active deviations; frames become porous; excess assumes form. And it's through art and literary encounters, waste, and the objects caught in galleries, cabinets, hospitals and on surveillance platforms that fill this work. Through bodies of text on objects of excess, strands of inter-texts build up, lumps emerge and pervade fixed forms, products, properties.
There it was, once, in an image that revealed a mass so dense that light could not pass through. Mine and not mine. It stopped there. It grew there.
Writing this took me through the experience of sickness and its imaging technologies—from digital scans to eighteenth-century anatomy; from the militaristic origins of imaging machines to pathology museums. I worked through them to find objects isolated, and I left wearing their textures. The more I looked, the more diffuse they became—connective, continuous, potent. And as the texts got bigger, they came to re-imagine bodies as permeable, shifting codes of health and its place, body, language, together through forms of excess.
NOIT—5: bodies as in buildings — Photo by Hannah Archambault
NOIT—5: bodies as in buildings — Photo by Hannah Archambault
It's Not Magic It's Not Madness
It's Not Magic It's Not Madness
This was written as part of MA Writing’s collaborative project at Flat Time House in 2019, for which we were encouraged to consider the boundaries of home, domestic, public, private.
In Collaboration with:
The bardic chair of 1984
Excerpt
Excerpt
Excerpt
Excerpt
An Invitation to Join the Wales Congress
Excerpt
Excerpt
Attention — Published by the Royal College of Art, 2019
Attention
I watch my dog run through the field with his belly grazing the grass. A dog never knows when it’s full. He runs from the mountain; the other way goes to the mountain. He runs for two reasons: because of instinct and because it’s raining. We both turn to the nearby clump of trees planted, I’ve heard, by Capability Brown—noted canopies of green mottle the open landscape. Blotches of ink strewn across the land. These inky masses have grown wider with time. But among these trees, the ground is lighter and not a drop of rain hits us.
MA Writing: Creature, Stranger, Monster, Other