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Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

Articles Available Online


Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

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

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

Art

Issue No. 1

'Untitled (book covers)'

Viktor Timofeev

Art

Issue No. 1

A slideshow presenting a series of collages by the London-based Latvian artist Viktor Timofeev, one gouache by whom was...

feature

April 2012

Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe

Will Stone

feature

April 2012

Que nos caravanes s’avancent Vers ce lieu marqué par le sang Une plaie au coeur de la France Y...

Art

June 2015

Photo London

Art

June 2015

From May 21-24, London’s Somerset House hosted the inaugural edition of London’s new international photography fair, Photo London.  ...

 

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