“ ” #3: Becky Beasley in conversation with Claire Scanlon

"During that time, all excited about Lydia Davis, I found myself in the middle of a website reading an interview with her and I noticed that there was an agenda. They were asking her about her micro-fiction, this extreme short-form writing, and whether it has any connection to being a parent, and being a single mother. It was in fact a single mother's website. She answered that of course it did. She would have little moments of time, sitting on a bench, tiny pockets of time, and she just found a way to use them. That was the genesis of her micro-fiction. I always remembered that, and I often mentioned it, over the years to friends when they were having their babies, thinking it was inspiring to female artists."

Around 1999, artist Becky Beasley began writing to her former tutor, Claire Scanlon, who kept her letters but never replied. Years later, in 2016, the two began to intermittently record their conversations, now as friends. Here they discuss their ‘components of practice’, which are as mundane as they are existential: space, time, literature, resistance, clarity, ambiguity, burrowing, parenthood, depression, and German Soup.

Edited by Adam Gibbons and Eva Wilson, “ ” (quotation mark quotation mark) is a series of books that looks at the forms and roles of publishing as and within artists’ practices. Each issue initiates a dialogue with an artist or artist group, through which a body of work is introduced. The series hosts conversations with artists who work at the intersection of publishing and exhibition-making: through circulation, dissemination, spamming, dispersion, print, data, language, myth, parasiting and infiltration. - NERO

Nero, 2019
English
Softcover, 76 pages
158mm x 105mm