Breakfast at the Beauty Spot

‘The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and other Stories’ is a collection of short stories written by artists. It is an experiment to see if there might be any discernable genre that is shared between those artists inclined to tell stories. My contribution was a chapter featuring a story entitled “Breakfast at the Beauty Spot”. This develops my ongoing activity as an artist working with the written and spoken work and the use of narrative and literary traditions.

The project makes manifest the engagement that many artists have with fiction and the written word by exposing points of coincidence. The book was widely reviewed in the art press and the national press.

Polly Gould

Research Interests

Landscape and the sublime
Contemporary fine art
Drawing
Performance and narratives
Public art and remembrance
Mourning and Melancholia in the arts
Relating theory to practice and the visual to the verbal.
Antarctica
Death
Representations of nature

Current Research

I work with drawing, sound, video and performance. I combine drawing and writing in installation works that also examine the narrative urge in our lives; the things we say to each other, the way we end up quoting favourite books, living our lives like scenes from films, or finding the words of a popular song to do our talking for us. I explore the 'writing oneself backwards' of autobiography and the work of memory. My work is concerned with our relationships as speaking subjects exploring questions of voice, power and desire, and presented in a live form as performance lectures of performance video works. I was short-listed for Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007, and had my short story included in The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B, a collection of fiction by contemporary British artists, in 2006.
I also collaborate with Anne Eggebert as Eggebert and Gould. We work on public art commissions, site-specific works and exhibition curation. We engage with the history and architecture of a place in order to uncover forgotten stories. We are currently researching Landscape and Anxiety in contemporary fine art practice with the view to developing a touring exhibition. We are interested in sustainability, representations of nature and landscape, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

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