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Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh's fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago X Stylist short story prize. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and forthcoming from Doubleday in the US.

Articles Available Online


Lena Andersson's ‘Acts of Infidelity’

Book Review

July 2018

Sophie Mackintosh

Book Review

July 2018

Acts of Infidelity is the second novel by Lena Andersson that follows unlucky-in-love heroine Ester Nilsson, and it’s another scalpel-sharp look at a doomed...

Fiction

May 2018

Self-Improvement

Sophie Mackintosh

Fiction

May 2018

I had been sent back from the city in disgrace, back to my parents’ house in the country. It...

Luke Hart’s Wall, recently on display at London’s William Benington Gallery, is a single, large-scale sculpture composed of a series of steel tubes held together by orange polyurethane joints The tubes at the base of the sculpture are welded together into an elongated S-shape, such that the work curves diagonally across the gallery floor, forcing the viewer to walk around it The welded base also provides the stability necessary for the rest of the sculpture to remain flexible The polyurethane joints make the work to some degree elastic, determining and limiting its movements   Wall, then, is not a wall in the conventional sense of the term The work’s lattice or weave-like structure articulates empty space It is a wall which, like a net, is mostly made up of holes And while the sculpture divides the gallery, setting a porous boundary between the spectator and the world, there is little difference between what is found on one side of the wall and what is found on the other There are further elements of the sculpture that add to its ambiguous status The polyurethane joints, for instance, work to hold the structure together, but there is also a tactile, almost fetishistic quality to the orange rubber, which looks like a tangle of muscle sinew This inscribes the sculpture in a bodily register and lends the work an anthropomorphic quality Like all elastic structures, moreover, Wall quickly settles into a particular position, while also remaining in a state of potential motion The way in which the sculpture pulls itself downwards dramatises its susceptibility to the laws of gravity Entropy might be too strong a word for this movement, but there is an unexpected sense of precarity and instability to the work, a sense that it might teeter over under its own dead weight   In a recent conversation, Hart explained that for him one of the most important aspects of Wall is its functionality At first the word seemed a misnomer It is true that, like a wall, the sculpture gets in the way, filling much of the gallery space, but otherwise its resemblance to

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh’s fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the...

Grace

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

Sophie Mackintosh

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

14. It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato then slicing each segment in...

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poetry

February 2014

Promenade & Dinner: Two Poems

Joe Dunthorne

poetry

February 2014

Promenade I was pursued by an immersive theatre troupe two of whom lay on the textured paving and performed...

Feature

Issue No. 19

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

poetry

February 2016

Maurice Echegaray

Lina Wolff

TR. Frank Perry

poetry

February 2016

It was when we were living near the southbound exit. Maurice Echegaray had his company office on our staircase...

 

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