Writing (MA)
Lucy Holt
Lucy Holt is a writer who lives in Manchester. Her non-fiction and poetry has appeared in The Observer, The Oxford Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, The Double Negative, Corridor8, this is tomorrow, Vague Visages, Ache Magazine and The Quietus. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Anthony Burgess/Observer Prize for Arts Journalism and was named a New Poet, with pamphlet forthcoming from The Poetry Business in 2021. She co-edits The Pluralist newspaper at the Royal College of Art and works as a copywriter.
The writing projects documented here are concerned with the inscribed or assumed rituals of everyday spaces. Specifically, what they might reveal about our impulses towards the communal. Whether it be the office (or home office), the meeting points of a ‘social’ internet, sites of construction and the city, or sitting around the sofa watching the television, these cultural phenomena are endlessly fascinating. From socialist film societies in the North of England in the 1930s—which used the distribution of film as a vehicle for political organisation—to the supposed allure of increasingly decentralised and casualised workplaces in cities, these texts seek to understand what the habitual can open up in terms of critiques of labour, gender, industry, community, the body and more.
Through the four projects documented here are an essay for NOIT Journal on soap opera and memory, a collaborative text and photo book based on the construction of the RCA’s new Battersea campus, an archival research project about socialist film societies in the North West of England and a Final Major Project comprised of a series of short essays on the desk. Throughout, there is a relationship to the archive, specifically its allure and its drawbacks, how archival material is romanticised but so often frustrating or incomplete, and how this allows for cultural myth-making for instance.
The Final Major Project, presented here, looks too to memory and exchange. Formed of a series of short texts on and around the life of the desk; in painting, in poetry, on Instagram, in contemporary offices housed in repurposed factories, the text questions the cultural and imaginative roles of the desk, and our conflicting desires to be present at or show off our desks, whilst also moving towards decentralised and dematerialised ways of doing work.Â
Research texts
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Excerpt from 'The Desk' poem by Marina Tsvetaeva (1933)
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Lyrics from 'Life on a String' bu Laurie Anderson (2001)
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The desk is the mute object behind almost every piece of art we encounter. It is present in the books we read, the film and television media we consume. It stands for the bureaucracy that governs our daily lives. Collectively, desks do strange things to time; when we seek the freedom to do our own desk-bound
working and thinking, we rarely find it. Conversely, if our day job happens to be desk-based, we might feel we never get to leave it. A desk is unglamorous, and at the same time, it can be transgressive, the site of sexual encounter. It’s permanent and unwieldy. It’s also sometimes completely imaginary. BASKET, TABLE, BUTCHER’S BLOCK explores the cultural history of the desk, from the image of Saint Jerome in his study, much replicated by artists, to the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, depictions of gender transgression played out in corporate America in Mad Men, to the contemporary compulsion to fetishise beautiful, ‘well curated’ desk spaces.
Looking to the etymology of ‘desk’, which has its roots in words for ‘table’, ‘basket’, butcher’s block’, these essays consider the implications of an object which is so slippery; a domestic surface, a vessel, a site of butchery. These themes are navigated via personal anecdote, pop-cultural reference points and a handful of theoretical texts, as the chapters oscillate between the immediate, the historical, the trivial and existential, thing the shape of a cluttered, well-used desk; populated with objects which create a meandering but complimentary whole.
The full text is temporarily available to read at the link below.
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18,000 wordsResearch texts and images
Archival materials from the Working Class Movement Library, Salford
Text extract from 'Moving Studies'
Text extract from 'Moving Studies'
Text extract from 'Moving Studies'
Text extract and research material from 'Moving Studies'
Text extract and research material from 'Moving Studies'
Text extract and research material from 'Moving Studies'
A selection of still from 'Co-operette', a 1938 musical produced to promote The Co-op
The full text is temporarily available to read at the link below.
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5,000 words
Research texts
NOIT — 5 publication image by Hannah Archambault
NOIT — 5 publication image by Hannah Archambault
Extract from 'Interior Lives'
Extract from 'Interior Lives'
Extract from 'Interior Lives'
Extract from 'Interior Lives'
Extract from 'Interior Lives'
NOIT — 5 publication image by Hannah Archambault
Animated GIF downsized large 2
The publication was designed by Emily Schofield and is available to order via the link below.
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3,000 words
Photo book published by FOLIUM
Scan of back and front cover, featuring debased text
Photo by David Barreiro
Scan of interior double page
Photo by David Barreiro
Scan of interior double page
Photo by David Barreiro
Photo by David Barreiro
Scan of interior double page
Photo by David Barreiro
There's an eye towards the absurd nature of construction in David's photos; the sheer abundance of materials and seemingly impossible infrastructure, which manifests itself differently in the three prose poems entitled 'An Inventory of Gaps', 'Notes on Churning' and 'Visibilities'.