How do audiences talk to institutions? To artists? Can they talk back? Artists are reaching the public not just through exhibitions, or through publicity channels, or even critical arts writing. Audiences use media — social media, specifically — to imagine an online open–forum to engage with art and artists. There’s a fraught online ecology that […]

September 2025 The annotated call  We Swear We Saw This. Drawings about Notebooks and Notebooks about the Wor(l)ds explores the variety of methodologies found in artists’ and writers’ notebooks. The theme of the issue adapts titles from both the anthropologist Michael Taussig’s book and artist Adrian Piper’s work.[1] Taussig expands on how drawing as a […]

Our lines are the first vehicle we ride to reach the shape of memory. Nubian aunties have been sketching our way to a lost homeland on sand, and etching those shapes in our collective consciousness, before they swipe the sand to level with the palm of their hand. And this particular kind of sketching lives […]

The Tasmanian painter and printmaker Bea Maddock’s (1934-2016) exploration of spatial experience had been key to her practice well before she began making formal landscapes. Curiously, her comments on qualities of place often belied how seriously she took spatial observation. Maddock described her book This Time (1967-69) as having ‘no real story, it’s just about […]

Introductory Note: The Problem of Notation What does it mean to take note of a place? To observe it, record it, mark it: without seeking to fix or contain it? This deceptively simple question underpins the intellectual premises of the exhibition HOME 25 – Invisible Cities shown in Dandenong between 21 June and 27 September […]

With each day the weight seemed to shift beneath me. The weight of the decision to go: to approach the border with the full knowledge that the consequences would never be mine to control. This weight was the kind that sits behind the ribcage, low and slow. The weight of being seen, of being misread, […]

In the stark geometry of colonial Jerusalem, where stone and ideology pressed against each other with brutal intimacy, Palestinian artist Nahil Bishara drew her lines. The Palestine Museum’s online collection preserves what the empire would erase: 234 annotated university assignments from Bishara (1942-1955), each page a small rebellion against the cartography of exclusion.[1] Here, in […]

First published in 1956, H.D.’s Tribute to Freud is a poetic account of her psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. Written intermittently between 1944 –1948, it is a strange little book: part composite biography of the famous psychoanalyst, part diary and part epistolary exchange. Following the London Blitz, H.D. — already an established poet, novelist and translator […]

Increasingly, the artist’s notebook is exhibited as an artwork in its own right. From Frances Stark’s annotated book paintings to the exhibition and republication of Lee Lozano’s spiral bound pads, the notebook has well and truly entered the system of contemporary art. These works bring with them a series of historical assumptions about the role […]

A Life in Titles (2017) is a series of hand-drawn cards constructed from my field note diaries during a period of living and studying in Paris. I recorded phrases overheard in public, alongside fragments from intimate conversations with peers and loved ones. These later became divination devices, speculative ‘high theory’ tools and codes used to […]

—- Written by Zara Sully, in collaboration with Lisa Roberts. Lisa and Zara are friends and artists who share a deep passion for connecting people, fostering conversation, and creating spaces where art and community can flourish together. —- [1] ‘Sonder,’ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/sonder (accessed July 2025). [2] Phone conversation with Lisa Roberts, […]

Passenger Pigeons were once so numerous that European settlers reported ‘dusks lasting for days’ as the birds migrated over New York.[1] Over the course of  two human generations, overhunting and habitat destruction drove the species extinct. Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in an enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo at 1pm, 1 September 1914.[2] A century […]

lifting the skirt that covered  the legs of an antique chair I saw to my horror a head with no eyes mouth or ears[1] A mounting pressure builds in the bones of the room. It began in the foundations of the house, like a heartbeat reverberating further with each thud. It leaks forth from the […]

I started keeping notebooks some time around age sixteen. It was 2003 and for an English assessment I’d submitted a short story inspired by the Book of Genesis; something about Adam running around the Garden of Eden with a missing rib and bleeding all over the place. As we all sat down in class one […]

To underline is to draw a line under a word, phrase or sentence to give emphasis. Underlining feels like ‘snapping fingers’ at a combination of words that feels just right. Sometimes I feel apprehensive about underlining because of the way it might only represent my initial comprehension of something, which makes it a bit exhilarating  […]

‘Witnessing’ — one of my notebooks insists — ‘is always oriented not toward the present, but towards its passing, and so justice remains incomplete’. These multiplying notebooks are not merely containers, a series of space-time reflections, but also parties in the ongoing documentation of a struggle against what liberation theologians decades ago termed ‘structural sin’. […]

‘That’s when I found out my mum could access other worlds — ones that neither we nor my dad nor any of us could reach. Especially not my dad. I remember one of many days watching him flipping through Maga’s notes. I remember him starting off slow, scanning left to right, top to bottom and […]