“I never read when I get stuck, it doesn’t leave enough room to let the devil slip in. Instead, I look to other forms for the methods to resolve art’s various conundrums. Often music helps but, increasingly, I’m interested in photography and the work of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, particularly.
From subversive beginnings, in pictures filled with explicit vulnerability and heady life—I find the beautiful 'The Cock (kiss)' from 2002 intensely affecting and often stare at it when grappling with problems connected to youth and desire—to the silent concentration of his still lifes, the poignancy of his airplanes and their vapor trails contrasting with the agoraphobia-inducing astronomy pictures, the portraits which seem to offer the very essence of their subject while somehow remaining private and impenetrable. The provocatively humane work for homeless and AIDS charities, the abstract experiments with light and color, as well as some of his more recent work which challenges and interrogates the physical object of the photograph itself. The journey of Tillmans’s work reminds me of James Joyce and his literary voyage from the streets of Dublin to the dark heart of the world but, and most importantly, it opens the gateways of understanding, as only great art can.”
—Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Coffee House Press, 2014)
Photo credit: Jemma Mickleburgh