Guest artist HAROUN HAYWARD

joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss his work via 'The Sea The Sea' by Iris Murdoch. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, it was first published in 1978 by Chatto & Windus, and most recently by Vintage Classics as part of Penguin Books.

The chaotic story centres around Charles Arrowby, a director, actor and playwright who has retired from his highly glamorous London life to become something of a hermit in a near isolated house by the sea. Just like in slapstick theatre he bumps up against a myriad of characters, including his buddhist cousin James, his childhood sweetheart Mary Hartley Fitch, ex lover Lizzie Scherer whose life he destabilises once again, and Lizzie’s ex lover before Charles - Peregrine Arbelow, the Irish drunk.

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Haroun and Jillian's conversation encompasses skateboarding, cancer, philosophy, thalassophobia, repetition, serpents, Japan, overthinking, identity, unclean, synesthesia, graffiti, enlightenment, hippiedom, apophenia, keystones, dog poo, constructivism, cascading failures, narrative honesty, suprematicism, magic realism, suppressing thought, apocalypse fish, landscape painting, self flagellation, vorticism, etching plates, herding cats, horror films, zombie formalism, lack of soul and poetry, and giving up painting to be a fry cook.

HAROUN HAYWARD

harounhayward.com

@harounhayward

'Path Through Trees' 30 May - 1 Nov 2026

ARTISTS + WORKS

Ben Nicholson

Ben Westerby

Bridget Riley

Carolin Walker

Chris Offili

Édouard Vuillard

Frankie Knuckles

Hans Memling

Hergé 'The Adventures of Tintin'

Hokusai 'The Great Wave'

Model 500

Paul Nash 'The Wanderer'

Paul Nash 'Path through Trees'

Peter Doig

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Philip Guston 'I Paint What I Want to See'

Sonia Delaunay

Shezad Dawood

Ukiyo-e

Wassily Kandinsky

Wilhelmina Barnes Graham

Winifred Nicholson

WRITERS + BOOKS

Edward James

Gabriel García Márquez

Haruki Murakami

Iris Murdoch 'The Black Prince' + 'The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited' + 'The Severed Head'

John Burnside 'Black Cat Bone'

Kim Sloan 'Places of the Mind: British Watercolour Landscapes 1850-1950'

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tom McCarthy 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature'

William Shakespeare 'King Lear' + 'The Tempest'

ARTS ORGANISATIONS

Goldsmiths

Hales Gallery

Indigo Madder - Kritika Sharma

Kunsthistorisches Museum

Pallant House

Tate St Ives

Thamesside Studios

Turner Contemporary

West Dean College

Zwirner Gallery

Guest artists JENNET THOMAS and SALLY O'REILLY come together to discuss their work via the short story 'Critique' by Ben Marcus. Published in 2018 by Alfred A Knopf and Grant Books, it is one of 13 stories appearing in 'Notes from the Fog' which explore dysfunction, desolation and disconnection within a woundingly funny collision of art and reality.

'The Big Throw' at SET Social 23 April 2026

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Get in touch! artfictionspodcast@gmail.com

"...narrative plot and how sticky and unpleasant it can be" JT

"The idea of just working in response to the infinity of the universe is appalling to me" SO'R

Sally and Jennet's conversation encompasses anti-plot, delirium, vertigo, maximalism, hermeticism, visitations and the grotesque. Yearning superpowers of persuasion, they go on and about carboot sales, ontological slippage, lemon sucking, deceptive loops, skewing language, twiddling knobs, automatic sterilisers, visually flamboyant, minor violences, constricting constraints, painting barcodes, slyly political, shifting rules, making knickerbockers, troubling reality, social reproductions, found objects, draped flesh, ecstatic technology talk, working in a factory, the pleasure of difficulty, a taste in the head, reality from the inside out, audience participation as part of the materials, weirdness coming into the living room, jumping to the whip of the ref, being wary of simplification and elegance, well made in a brutal violent sense at gunpoint, and a seal in mud with a lion's head.

JENNET THOMAS

jennetthomas.com

@jennetthomas

'School of Change' 2012

'All Suffering SOON TO END!' 2010

'Return of the Black Tower (after John Smith)' 2007

SALLY O'REILLY

sallyoreilly.org.uk

@manfredopenarms

'The Money Laundering Service' 2025

'Dog Shelves' 2024

'Where They Gather' 2022

'Estee Lauder Factory' 2022

'The Annual Retrieval' 2016

'The Virtues of Things' 2015

"I can't breath"

Eric Garner

George Floyd

ARTISTS

John Smith

Kit Downes

Klara Kofen

Leo Chadburn

Matt Rogers

Maz Murray

Simeon Barclay

WRITERS + BOOKS

Christine Brooke-Rose

Frieze magazine

M John Harrison

Muriel Spark

Russell Hoborn 'Riddley Walker'

Sally O'Reilly 'Help in Cucumbers'

Will Self

William Empson

FILM + TELEVISION

'Bedknobs and Boomsticks'

'Brimstone and Treacle'

Dennis Potter

Michael Kitchen

'The Terminator'

GALLERIES + ORGANISATIONS

Bandcamp

Horse Hospital

Matts Gallery

ICA Institute Contemporary Art

October House Records

Opera North

Royal Opera House

SET Social

SLG South London Gallery

Guest artist CARRIE MOYER

joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss her work via 'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker. Published in 1962 by Houghton Mifflin (US) and Victor Gollancz (UK), most recently Daunt Books, with sympathetic tenderness and acerbic wit, it follows twin sisters Cassandra and Judith as they navigate Judith’s wedding to a very pleasant and capable young doctor.

The other key characters are their father, a retired philosophy professor who fancies a Brandy soda tipple, the ghost of their dead mother and their maternal grandmother.

Get in touch with us via artfictionspodcast@gmail.com

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"it feels like all of the interesting innovations have been done by women painters in terms of abstraction"

Carrie and Jillian's conversation encompasses activism, wit, abandonment, confusion, family, ambivalence, agitpop, snarkiness, ambiguity, galaxy, queer, optical bliss, transitional places, menacing edge, geological time, mental illness, burying identity, utter distaste, ominous vibe and deadpan humour. They also talk about family as a cult, female body parts, destabilised vibration of colours, digging under conventions, being a lesbian in public, hard edge abstraction, vicious in a great beautiful smart way, wholesome hetro homemakers, abstract expressionism as a language and what the future is supposed to hold for you as a young woman.

CARRIE MOYER

'Always Venus, Never Mars' Pilar Corrias 23 Jan - 7 Mar 2026

carriemoyer.com

@carrie.moyer.studio

'Queer Abstraction' Des Moines Art Center by Curator Jared Ledesma 1 Jun - 8 Sep 2019

'Cave Dwellers who Paint Abstraction' 2025

'Radiant Granularity' 2025

'Art Glass' 2016

ARTISTS + CURATORS

Amy Sillman

Anish Kapoor

Béla Bartók

David Getsy

Dona Nelson

Elizabeth Murray

Frank Stella

Helen Frankenthaler

Jack Whitten '9.11.01' 2006 after Sep 11 2001

Judy Chicago

Laura Owens

Louise Fishman

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley 'Best Femmes Forever'

Morris Louis

Pat Steir

Rebecca Byrne

Rochelle Feinstein

Sabine Moritz

Stephen Meuller

William Butler Yeats

BOOKS + AUTHORS + FILM

Anna Burns 'The Milkman' narrator Brid Brennan

Arundhati Roy 'Mother Mary Comes to Me'

Audible

'Carrie Moyer' 2021 with contributions by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Katy Siegel, Joanna Dinah Fateman by Rizzoli Electa

Flann O'Brien 'The Third Policeman' narrator Jim Norton

J D Salinger 'Catcher in the Rye'

John Gray 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'

'The Ice Tower'

Travis Jeppesen 'Queer Abstraction (Or How to Be a Pervert with No Body) Some Notes Toward a Probability' Mousse magazine 2019

'Young Man with a Horn' 1950

UNIVERSITIES + ORGANISATIONS

Boston University

Daunt Books

Hunter College, New York

London Film Festivals

MoMA, New York 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger' 2025

Pratt Institute