Oh Comely 43 midsummer

stories / culture / curiosities / makers / ideas

Learnings from lipstick Re-dressing gender • Writing in cafés The lists that make up a life issue 43  £6

What we’re loving A curated selection of what’s in our diaries, shopping baskets and on our minds this issue words frances ambler, alice snape and bre graham

Sushi love

Inspired by chopsticks and sushi, this cushion isn’t only gorgeous – profits go to Designs in Mind, a studio where adults with mental health challenges work together. £48, thisisjolt.co.uk

Surreal but nice Break from reality with The Hepworth Wakefield’s latest exhibitions.

Discover the contribution of photographer (and one of our heroes) Lee Miller to surrealism in the 1930s, then explore her influence on contemporary Dutch artist and photographer Viviane Sassen.

From 22 June to 7 October, hepworthwakefield.org Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2018.

All rights reserved

Pin Cushion is in cinemas from Friday 13 July (lucky for us).

Written and directed by Deborah Haywood, it stars Lily Newmark as Iona who starts a new school and struggles with bullying.

Machete’s earrings are more than cute – they’re also made from cellulose acetate, an eco-friendly alternative to petroleumbased materials. And the price is pursefriendly too. £20, foundbath.co.uk

No sunshine? Bring it with swimwear We’re crazy about New Zealand brand Lonely’s lovely lingerie, so we’re super excited that they’re now making swimwear too – which is just as lush.

Stitching queen

There something special about stitching. Sophie King’s powerful embroidery work

Greta swimsuit buttercup,

can be found on everything

£124, lonelylabel.com

from pins to tote bags.

Frame Sophie’s artwork or wear it with her tote bags and T-shirts. ‘You blew it’ art print £20; T-shirt £42, kingsophiesworld.co.uk

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experience

Portrait of the self Think of the fun Frida Kahlo could have had in the era of the selfie.

We asked five different artists to capture themself on camera

portraits by the artists interviews frances ambler and alice snape

Bae Sharam, performance artist Outside of Bae, I’d describe myself as queer, gender-fluid, non-binary... a weirdo.

As Bae, I perform “muslim”. I didn’t come out as queer, I came out as muslim.

A lot of people think Bae is who I am. I do think of Bae as a “she” and, in my outside life, I’ve had the experience of a female-bodied person. But she’s confident and outlandish, while I’m quite quiet, the product of a very restrictive upbringing in Pakistan. She’s the antithesis of that.

I left Islam for a while but I realised I had to reconcile myself, that I have this baggage of culture that I need to acknowledge, rather than ignore.

I say that I’m a political rather than a faithful muslim. I’ve been performing for just over a year now. I actually started after mentioning to an ex-partner that I fancied an art of drag course and

they surprised me with it as a present.

Ten weeks of it, on a Monday night.

I’ve since focused my voice into doing a muslim thing. Drag is full of white bodies and it can be centred on a camp, western experience. There aren’t so many queer and muslim performers.

Because I’ve a full-time job and don’t rely on performing for my income, I feel like I can use it to say something more political and personal, a bit darker.

When I’ve told people that I’m muslim or Pakistani, I’ve immediately felt a wall come up. I went on a date and the person launched into a rant about how Islamophobia wasn’t a thing. At a recent performance about the death toll of the War on Terror, one reviewer wrote that it was a “2005 subject”. That’s exactly why I do what I do – the reviewer is coming from a place of privilege that allows them

to think that way.

Muslim women are often presented as wearing something black, modest and shapeless. I wanted my self-portrait to show something different. I’ve pulled out the wig I wore for my first ever show – I used to tell people I was a “natural pink”.

I wanted to nod to my femmeness, but also to images of women, such as the Virgin Mary. The woman is centre stage, surrounded by flowers and softness.

Because of the restrictions of what I want to talk about – always through the lense of a muslim person – it pushes me to be creative as I can be, for example, Batman burka burlesque. For my next show, I’m doing Guantanamo Baywatch.

I am pale skinned, I don’t have a foreign accent, I don’t dress or act in a certain way. It creates confusion. I use my identity as a way of challenging people. 

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44

culture

Open to interpretation Andrea Fernandes' You Laugh As Much As You Cry doesn’t offer up documentary truth – she leaves it open to the viewer to determine their own path. When displayed, her work is shown as a three-dimensional projection immersing viewers into her impressions of the people she met, the conversations she captured, and the places she visited. “Like with memory and conversations, there are no rules or linear narratives – there are as many authors as there are allusions,” says Andrea. 

This is an observation on what it means to be a woman today in traditionally patriarchal Punjab, spanning West Bromwich to Jalandhar

45

fashion

NIAMH WEARS: Bra, £90, pants, £35, both by Else Stockings, £20, Paper Dress Vintage Shoes, £450, Grenson Gold ‘Pretty Dix’ earrings, £160, and pendant (in hand), £240, both by Sam Hamilton JORDAN WEARS: Corset, £18, Atika London Jeans, £40, Monki

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“I’ve always had a disconnect with being assigned male at birth.

This misalignment was evident to me years before I knew what transsexual meant”

Jordan Busson Jordan is an outreach worker and chorister who identifies as transfeminine*.

Jordan is still figuring out what to do about that – what’s possible and viable, and what bodily changes that might mean. There’s no clear endpoint.

* Assigned male at birth, but identifies with femininity

beauty

Made-up stories Five writers tell us about the personal beauty rituals that have become part of who they are

illustrations helena pérez garcía

Twiggy mascara words megan hall

One of my close friends wore heavy make-up and, when I was 13, came to stay over. I took a real interest in her make-up box. I quickly became obsessed. My mum was never someone I’d look to for make-up advice – she’s a natural beauty – but she put a dab on my eyes, just mascara to start with. The eyeliner came later.

My eyes are particularly big and I found that the looks I’d see in magazines were hard to recreate. When I first started out, I definitely used too much. It wasn’t until someone compared me to Twiggy that I found a look that I could do. Growing up, I worked on a cosmetics floor and would clump my bottom eyelashes together, baffling the make-up artists around me with how I did it.

I adore putting it on. I suffer with anxiety and when I put my make-up on, I get a feeling of true calm. Nothing makes me feel more content than putting on my

make-up, wrapped up in my nightgown with a cuppa and some music. On a weekday, I’ve got it down to 10 minutes, sometimes less. If I am allowed unlimited time then it takes, perhaps, 30 minutes.

It upsets me when friends or parents make throwaway comments about the amount of time it takes, or even that I’m putting it on.

Most of the time, my make-up is my shield and it helps me through the world but sometimes I’m made to feel it’s my vice.

To this day, every boyfriend I’ve had has pushed the fact that I should go without make-up more often. They fail to realise how it has become my identity. Even girlfriends seem to be shocked when I take it off, and comment on how ‘nice’ I look.

I doubt that I’ll ever lose the winged liquid eyeliner and black mascara.

When I picture myself in the future, with my children and their children, I’m still wearing my staple winged eyeliner and clumpy mascara, with my boyfriend somewhere in the background rolling his eyes! 

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culture

More than one voice From finding out she was pregnant on the way to Glastonbury at 26, to her daughter’s third birthday, poet Hollie McNish is making motherhood a universal subject

interview marta bausells portrait helmi okbara

Hollie McNish’s poetry is often compared to talking to a good friend. I’d go further and say her poems are the friend you never knew you needed, then fall in love with, then can’t imagine your life without.

Above all, they feel true, and that doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent or thoughtful.

What it means is they connect with a whole lot of humans who perhaps were used to feeling like poetry was a stuffy, unreachable – and mainly male – art form.

And what it means, in Hollie’s case, is that she breaks with the idea that only male troubles are worthy of art, and of the word “universal”.

Take her collection Plum, her fifth book: it features poems on themes like being a teenage girl in the countryside, PMT, being felt up by a manager, how friendships change through the years, rules for turning 30, even trips to Tesco’s where you’re in a bad mood and hate every miserablelooking couple you see. She intersperses current poems with some written when she was as young as eight, sometimes giving context for when, why, and where they were written.

Meanwhile, Hollie’s Nobody Told Me – for which she won the Ted Hughes award in 2016 – puts motherhood where it deserves, up there with the most universal of subjects. It’s a blend of memoir and poetry that charts what motherhood was really like for her, from the moment she found out she was pregnant on a King’s Cross loo on the way to Glastonbury, to her daughter’s third birthday. I spoke to Hollie on a recent spring afternoon.

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When did you start writing poetry, and what did it mean to you at the time?

I started writing at seven, but not a lot.

It says in Plum that my first poem was one called ‘How the World Should Be’, but I wrote another at a similar time, about how angry I was with my dad that he wouldn’t let me get a cat. It was quite rude to him! [laughs] I know for some poets it’s the love of language, in the sense that they spend ages trying to find the right word, but it wasn’t really that for me. It was more a love of trying to work out what thoughts were in my head and putting them down in a way I could understand. Not for other people.

In Nobody Told Me, you write about the first years of motherhood in such an open way; I’ve never read anything like it. It’s annoying to think people might assume I’m interested in it because I’m a woman – it’s because it’s a terrifying, fascinating experience to read about!

I like that. It often got pushed into the “parents’ guide” category in bookshops.

Lots of people have said, “I’m not a mum or a parent but I really enjoyed it.” I find that very funny, because nobody says, “You have to be a soldier to read war poetry,” or, “You have to be a murderer to watch a horror film.” It’s ridiculous, the idea that you have to have lived an experience to read about it. That’s not why people pick up a book, in order to read something about their own life – otherwise they’d just read their own diary! Motherhood is not seen as a subject in novels but it’s such an amazing minefield: psychologically, biologically and physically.

Do you remember a point in which you had the clarity that you’d found your voice, and felt that it was valuable to share with the world?

I don’t really believe that people have just one voice. You think differently when you’re on a night out, than when you’re talking to your grandparents, than when you’re at work. I think everyone’s got so many different personalities in themselves.

But I guess it’s still quite a struggle sometimes to put poetry out and for it not to be called unintelligent or worthless because it’s not using certain structures or certain forms. I’ve never really been interested in using a massive vocabulary in my poems, and I love poets that can build a picture of a scene, because the English language is bloody amazing, I think. But that’s not really what I’ve been interested in with language.

I think that because the poems I write are often quite simply put, and also often quite vulgar – using swear words or slang – they’re often deemed less intelligent or less thoughtful. That is what I find the most aggravating. I think about a poem just as much as someone who’s trying to write in sonnet form. So, yeah, there’s a snobbery about what it is that a poem should be, or why you’re writing. I think there’s space for everything.  Hollie is touring Plum and Nobody Told Me. Find out more at holliepoetry.com. She’ll be appearing at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 30 June. For tickets and more details go to poetry-festival.co.uk

#onegoodthing Playing dress up

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