I AM a big fan of the ekphrastic theme of Artery – I think Hem is reminiscent of this feature in the conversations it tries to stimulate. 

Having edited and (nearly) published your first two editions, what do you think the ekphrastic overtones of contributors’ work has taught you about how people approach writing in response to a single piece of art? 

For context, each issue of Artery Zine focusses on a piece of artwork by an emerging artist from WA.

CONTRIBUTORS take different approaches in responding to the artwork. Some write quite closely to the artwork’s themes, without necessarily incorporating its imagery; in these cases, the result functions similarly to how a critical analysis might, explicating an element of the artwork’s meaning and extending it with personal insights. 

Others take the work’s aesthetic as their guide, invoking elements of its appearance through the structure of their writing and its motifs. 

As would be expected, ‘pavement’, ‘stones’, ‘boulders’, ‘cement’, are the recurrent images throughout the responses to You are mist, while some contributors have attempted to render the more abstract quality of its feeling and textures— this leading to a fragmentary, hazy, or coarse quality in their writing. 

However, all works fundamentally share a certain feeling or ‘spirit’, which likely emerges from contributors’ close observation of and extended reflection on the artwork’s appearance and meanings.

In fact, though contributors choose how ‘faithfully’ they respond to the artwork, this act of attention means the artwork itself nonetheless infiltrates the writing and, in a way, co-authors it. We see this most clearly through the surfacing of certain patterns throughout the works, which are ostensibly unrelated to the artwork’s meaning or aesthetic. 

In issue one, which responded to arts editor Ruby Axon’s piece Netted Embrace (a net Ruby wove from her hair), the ocean and oceanic imagery cropped up in most pieces, despite Ruby’s work making no obvious reference to the ocean (though, incidentally, it figures explicitly in much of Ruby’s other pieces). 

Similarly, in issue two, contributors have turned to trees as a motif, nearly as much as they have to cement and stones. A particularly canny example of this is in Alan Fyfe’s poem ‘Corymbia Citriodora’ and Shannon Taylor’s essay ‘Numinous Oil’, where both writers describe the scent released by crushing lemon-scented gum-tree leaves in their hands. 

The artworks ‘work’ both consciously and unconsciously on writers; it’s fascinating.

WHAT prompted you three to begin Artery Zine?

ALL three of us (Ruby Axon, Dionne Sparks, and myself) have a visual arts background, though Ruby is now a fine arts major, and Dionne and I are in literary studies. 

Aside from allowing us to explore our interests, we created Artery with the hope of fostering exchange between writers and artists (an idea of connection and interflow which informed the name, Artery).

As we see it, there are many material advantages of this interdisciplinarity. 

The dialogue and collaboration it encourages allows both local writers and artists to enrich their skills, while also building community connections. 

Likewise, we hoped the magazine could provide a platform where emerging talent and youth perspectives were taken seriously; an endeavour the Hem launch night will realise, with its showcase of contributor readings alongside an exhibit of Lucinda’s artwork.

However, we also began ARTERY with the (nerdier!) hope of creating a publication whose outcomes tested those of traditional literary magazines. 

Writers have long used ekphrasis to complicate the distinctions between literature and visual art; poetry typically lends itself to this sort of experimentation, while novelists including modernists like Virginia Woolf, to contemporary writers such as Rachel Cusk and Ali Smith, have reorganised traditional narrative structures by taking cues from visual art’s abstract, typically wordless language. 

We wanted to see what would happen if a similar approach was applied to a body of collected writing, and how this might differ from those that use the perhaps a more conventional word-prompt or theme approach.

In this next issue of ARTERY, contributor Mia Kelly frames her sci-fi piece “‘Satin? Genuine? In a Revolution?’: a Mizlerian collage of fragments” as an ‘affective collage’, which is perhaps an apt way to describe the results of this experiment so far. 

Rather than feeling like a collection of distinct, albeit thematically-aligned writings, the works across both issues read as intrinsically connected, sharing images, motifs, and atmospheres that move in and out of focus and whose meanings continually shift—as was our goal.

WOULD you be able to speak briefly to what Lucinda Sheardown’s You Are Mist *potentially* means within this upcoming issue? Having edited the majority of pieces, have you noticed a theme emerge?

IT’S a massive honour to include Lucinda’s beautifully conceived and executed piece as the centrepiece of this issue; its ideas are complex, and have strongly resonated with contributors. 

As was expected, memory, nostalgia, childhood and the loss of childhood are central themes across contributors’ responses (these being the focus of Lucinda’s piece), but there are some fascinating patterns and repetitions in the ways these ideas are explored. 

Perhaps reflecting the earthly connotations of the cement bricks, many pieces make nature and the natural world their subject. 

Some highlight the importance of nature in childhood play and, following that, how the natural world continues to shape who we are into adulthood. 

Associated with this, many pieces question what we define as ‘natural’: some consider the ways in which certain attitudes about identity and self-expression are naturalised through processes of socialisation that begin from early childhood, heteronormativity being a recurring example, while others examine how the rise of new technologies causes ideas about what is ‘natural’ to shift (a dialectic implicit in the artwork, with its combination of a technological medium — photography — with the geologically-derived medium of cement).

This political slant is also carried into reflections on the work’s rubble-like appearance, some addressing military violence through sci-fi dystopias, while others make more specific links to current world events, including the horrifying levels of violence and destruction Israel is imposing on Gaza. 

But — and I mention this in the issue’s introduction — the main theme that seems to animate the issue is a drive to recapture a feeling of aliveness that, at some point (whether in childhood or otherwise), has been lost or suppressed. 

Lucinda describes You are mist as ‘dark’ in its ideas, but even the most mournful works convey a desire to recapture some of the potential, fullness, and self-possession we often associate with childhood — while many pieces argue explicitly that doing so is actually possible.