/Strain

A long, deep, swelling drowsiness, where thoughts enter unhindered and untethered to each other, where writing is happening in my mind but dissolves as soon as it appears, and I close my eyes to clever patterns. They come in rosy dreams and disappear in effusive trembles. I feel a sensational kind of love ballooning up my legs, and it strikes fear into those around me. Like pennies, I count the months and they count me.

Alice Hill-Woods is a writer, researcher and (tentative) artist based in Glasgow. Her practice stakes out ground somewhere between the subjective body and the wider world. Emerging from a research practice oriented towards illness ecologies, she paused at the work of Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987), a Norwegian artist who sought to capture the wonders of the landscapes she found herself in. Using a mixture of methods and techniques, such as an expanded concept of ‘biography’, printmaking and photography, Alice began to find ways to fully inhabit her research practice, and subsequently brought others into its orbit. The resulting book-length project, spanning two years, explores the intrusive present, relational intimacies, reproductive agency, and the material and affective strands that bind intractable selves together. Here, the biography forms a mirage: ever apparent, ever out of reach.