Art and beauty suffuse our everyday lives. As Brian Dillon and Wendy Erskine remind us, what matters is how we look at the world around us.
“[Affinities] is a self-portrait of the critic as, evanescently but beautifully, an artist in his own right.” – Kevin Power, Irish Times
“Spiky and funny, dark and stylish – Wendy Erskine is a natural-born story-teller” – Kevin Barry
Art and beauty suffuse our everyday lives. As Brian Dillon and Wendy Erskine remind us, what matters is how we look at the world around us.
Brian Dillon’s work as an art critic overflows with affinities – the intimate connections that we create when we experience a work of art, or even the small, unassuming objects that make up our everyday lives. The pot plant on the windowsill, or the mugs in the cupboard, can form just as powerful an emotional response as any painting. Author Wendy Erskine’s career as a short story writer harmonises with this, and her edition of a new collection of essays, well I just kind of like it, explores the memories and stories that gather around the most ordinary parts of our lives, the aesthetics of home.
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Brian Dillon is a widely published art critic and writes regularly for Frieze, Art Review, Modern Painters, Tate etc., the Wire and Sight & Sound.
Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Sweet Home, her first collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.