frame 82 - June 2026
The Soldier
by James McAleer
Once a soldier came through the house. I was in the bath, knees bent, peeling the old blue vinyl from the side of the tub to make silhouettes in the cork beneath. Mostly I made maps and animals this way. I liked the bath and loved this game and hung over the side until the water grew cold, and the cold of the tub on my bare arm familiar, and so I never saw him… MORE
frame 81 - June 2026
The Black Lights - A Secret History of Blackpool
by Austin Collings
Blackpool is easiest to understand at night.
Not because the darkness conceals anything. It has never been interested in concealment. The town is fundamentally an act of exposure: electric, theatrical, over-painted, over-lit - a place that has spent nearly a century and a half announcing itself against the dark… MORE
frame 80 - May 2026
The Stairway That Separates My Room from My Memory
by Callum Stark
Curated by a group of Courtauld MA Curating students in collaboration with the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, The stairway that separates my room from my memory examines artists’ negotiation of migration and displacement through home and homemaking. MORE
frame 79 - April 2026
Kafka and Goya
by Roc Sandford
Sueño 1°
Franz Kafka
Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread … Yours, Franz Kafka.
101 years ago this April 26th, Franz Kafka’s unfinished masterpiece, The Trial, came out. Kafka had been dead for nearly a year, having asked for his manuscript to be burned. Fortunately, his executor and friend, Max Brod, disobeyed and published it instead. If you haven’t read The Trial yet, and can find the time, I’d read it now. MORE
frame 78 - April 2026
I Will Miss You, Because I Will Forget You
by Heba Hayek
From the stretch between North of Piccadilly and Holborn, I barely blinked at the thought that many people might be hearing a child’s genuine laugh for the first time, in a while anyway, but through an Instagram reel. A recording of it was going viral. In my distraction, I remembered when children’s laughter was first recorded on Nokia phones, as a way to challenge each other not to laugh. It was, of course, impossible.
People replaced each other in quick movements at the main stations, leaving crosses and parallels across the royal blue that washed the train seats and traced the lines on the floor. MORE
frame 77 - March 2026
The Two Roberts
by Bettina von Hase
I hadn’t heard of the Two Roberts until my friend, literary agent Clare Conville, suggested I accompany her to visit their eponymous exhibition at Charleston in Lewes, East Sussex. Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders is on until 12 April 2026. ‘You know about art, you’ll love it,’ she said when we met at Victoria Station to board the train, pressing a book by the writer Damian Barr into my hand. It bore the title The Two Roberts. The artists had a home and studio in Lewes from 1947 to 1949, close to Charleston Farmhouse, where Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell lived and assembled the Bloomsbury Group. MORE
frame 76 - February 2026
Gerry’s Pompeii
The story of how one man’s secret work became an art world sensation, and how curator Sasha Galitzine now strives to save it…
by Patrick Cash
In 2017 Sasha Galitzine was working as a freelance art curator, when her friend Roc Sandford said she had to meet his neighbour. She came to an address off the Harrow Road in West London and found a shy 81-year-old Irishman named Gerry Dalton wearing a bucket hat. Walking into his house, she was one of the first people to see thirty years of Gerry’s sculptures, filling every room and stretching down the garden, culminating in a giant tile artwork along the Regent’s Canal… MORE
frame 75 - January 2026
Amos Poe and the Lying Down Diaries
by Jane Rankin-Reid
New York film maker and writer Amos Poe has died at the age of 76 on December 25th 2025, from an aggressive colon cancer. His many films, from Blank Generation, Unmade Beds, Alphabet City to one of my personal favourites; Triple Bogey in a Par Five Hole, all use the city of New York as a character, rather than simply as a backdrop. Poe was a passionately energetic artist, one of the originators of 1970s and early 1980s No Wave cinema, a cinematic movement of rebellious discord aptly befitting the downtown New York scene in those years. He was always keen to explore the widest possible sources of inspiration; the poetic mess of improbabilities are well found in his films… MORE
frame 74 - December 2025
Thin Christmas
by Isobel McGrigor
The fattest I have ever got was during my first Christmas away from home. I didn’t notice my body changing. My two pairs of jeggings expanded with me. The only reflective surfaces I owned were a concave makeup mirror and a couple of spoons; I assumed my face’s roundness was due to converging rays of light.
I only realised I was fat when a child drew a picture of me and my friends: two stick figures, and a circle with a head, arms, and legs.
I was as jolly as my appearance suggested. I had lots of friends, and I went to parties every night of the week, where I drank red wine and coca cola… MORE
frame 73 - November 2025
The Catching Force
by Cosima Somerset
HV: What drew you to writing THE CATCHING FORCE – could you explain the process?
CS: I have wanted to write a book all my life but I had not written anything except a journal for years. In fact, I kept daily journals consistently, since the age of 11, despite running a business called Concierge in London for over 15 years. This was a lifestyle management service, now called Somerset White. Throughout all my work on this, I had become an expert in problem solving for our clients but it had left not much time for adventure.
However, when I went to on holiday to India for the first time in 2014, by chance I met Father Joe Pereira on the last night. It was a life changing event… MORE
frame 72 - October 2025
The Final Performance
by Gilson Lavis
Standing backstage at the Royal Albert Hall, I felt the familiar weight of nerves settling into my chest. But this time, something else accompanied them—a tingling in my legs, dizziness and fatigue, a sense of tightness and heaviness that had been creeping into my performances for months. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing the early stages of pulmonary fibrosis. I wasn’t in any shape to be performing, I wasn’t even sure I’d make it to the end of the show alive. Yet here I was, about to step onto the stage one last time… MORE
frame 71 - September 2021
Contamination: A Series of Monologues from Spirit Within the Tower of Babel
I am large, I contain multitudes – Walt Whitman
by Labeja Kodua Okullu
I would like to speak a history; I would like to speak to the present. I would like to
tell the story of a crushing movement from sand / to compact / to towers / to
abodes. I am speaking in such gibberish because I reside in the Tower of Babel… MORE
