Mailing List


Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane friend’s advice, had my real fingernails drilled down to nothing for the sake of having longer, obviously artificial nails installed The effect was simultaneously intoxicating, and impractical I re-learned how to type; relied, reluctantly, on male help in the workplace and at home to perform mundane tasks like opening cans and buttoning blouses I did not remember ever thinking that my hands had looked more beautiful, less like my hands They were like a celebrity’s; an artwork After two months, unable to afford maintenance, I had the nails removed Cut necessarily down to the quick, my fingernails now made my fingers look like toes, artless and blunt I could no longer regard my hands and think, as one is meant to after leaving an appointment at a salon, that I did not fully recognise them There was no distance, no transformation   Nail salons and hairdressers specialise in modifying the literally live-dead parts of human bodies; those that grow after we die, but do not bleed if cut More often than not, the live-dead parts being modified belong to women, who are not unused to being seen as an admixture of desirable-or-undesirable bodily fragments, rather than as whole This is especially true for famous women, whose live and live-dead parts are familiar enough to us, after such long exposure, to behave like semaphore; to signify a thing beside themselves In a promotional release for Live Dead World, a new show by the artist Gabriele Beveridge, an image appeared on Seventeen Gallery’s website Folded over on each other, pages from women’s high-fashion magazines – fluid and smooth, held in place by two or three rubber bands – made an abstract, feminine composite out of girl-eyes, girl-lips, and faded, indistinct girl-faces There, located front and centre, was Britney Spears’s mouth, a logo as distinctive as a Coca Cola bottle It is peculiar, and a little eerie, that although it’s possible I may not recognise my own mouth in a

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

poetry

April 2012

The Disappearance

Dana Goodyear

poetry

April 2012

A yellow veil dropped down at evening, and when it lifted everyone was gone. Good mothers fled their young...

Interview

August 2016

Interview with Daniel Sinsel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Interview

August 2016

In the decade after leaving Chelsea School of Art in 2002, Daniel Sinsel made a name for himself with...

Art

September 2011

Interview with Cornelia Parker

Lowenna Waters

Art

September 2011

Cornelia Parker has over the past twenty years carved out a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected sculptors...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required