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Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

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Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

I’ve never been ghosted by a work of art before, but I guess there is a first time for everything On entering Martine Syms’s new solo exhibition at Sadie Coles, I am confronted by Mythiccbeing (2018), an enormous video installation comprised of hundreds of miniscule LEDs Intermittently, a phone number comes up on a screen with the words ‘text me’ and I’m promised that if I interact, this work will respond When people refer to a piece of art communicating with the audience it isn’t usually meant in the most literal sense, and in my case at least, I’m left clutching my phone anxiously waiting for a text back to: ‘Hi bbz… How are you? What are you thinking about RN? Hellooooooo’ As the message bubbles gently shift from blue to green I feel an involuntary sense of dread – it appears even a chat bot can crush your self-esteem   This could easily be a Machiavellian trick designed to compound the overarching sense of social anxiety that fills the gallery Mythiccbeing is undoubtedly the focus, featuring a complex three-dimensional rendering of Syms’s face which appears to be imbued with her own physical characteristics: a brief sigh, a gentle move of the lips or a slight turn of the head This vision is interspersed with a montage of mundane video clips, random blocks of text and found imagery, all of which coincide with Syms’s enigmatic voiceover She reels off seemingly inconsequential and classically millennial thoughts around sex, money and everyday drama, all conveyed in the kind of language you would share with your friends in a group chat, as well as trance-like sexual interrogations: ‘Girl you like that? Girl you like that?’   These rapid switchbacks between hyper-erotic speech and trivial chat perfectly mimic the splintered communication most of us engage with every day through an onslaught of texts, DMs, emails and phone calls Combined with Syms’s own image, it’s as if you are getting inside her head at that exact moment when it feels like the brain can’t take it anymore, and the notion of a ‘digital detox’ promises sweet relief   Mythiccbeing, is

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

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poetry

August 2016

No Holds Barred

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

TR. Brian Hagenbuch

poetry

August 2016

Hello. Dr Rivers’ clinic? Thank you. Yes. Yes, doctor, I would like to be your patient. With your permission,...

feature

May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

feature

May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

poetry

January 2012

Picasso (1964)

Campbell McGrath

poetry

January 2012

A canvas comprises a totality of surface just as Spain is composed of constituent parts, Catalunya, Madrid, hills and...

 

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