Lucie Elven

Janet Frame​ didn’t like people writing about her. When they asked for interviews, she described them as ‘Porlock people’ (one biographer reported being ‘vigorously and efficiently rebuffed’). She believed she should be entitled to a private life, so she legally changed her name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha – in honour of a Māori chief and the Clutha...

‘Gina at Bruce’s dinner party, NYC’ (1991)

In the retrospective​ currently on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s glass cube in Berlin, six of Nan Goldin’s works are displayed inside large black felt-lined structures. Each has a different kind of entrance: one made of sumptuous velvet, another a cold blue corridor. Inside are...

It’s​ easy to imagine Brigid Brophy at London Zoo, making notes on the animals. I can see her by Berthold Lubetkin’s disused elliptical Penguin Pool or watching the apes. Two of them

used the full extent of the cage as a cubic area: their chases went also up and down, and up and down diagonally. Sometimes they shewed boredom, the consequence of play, and would fret for a moment;...

At​ the start of María Gainza’s first novel, Optic Nerve, the narrator, an art critic who is also called María, shows a couple round a grand house in Buenos Aires. She is wearing a soaking wet dress and a pair of fluffy slippers. She tells us with some self-deprecation that her job is taking rich foreigners to see private art collections. On this occasion, she had been...

The child​ is made of unspun wool, ripped linen in a tubular hollow, rope unlacing from its braid, knotted gauze and sleeves of protective net pulled apart into rows of diamonds, as tall as the hall. Some strands pool on the floor, others drift overhead. At the other end of the room, the mother is more elaborate: her strings twist around ladders; plant fibres form wheels and trapezes....