Fish Out of Water

by Claire-Louise Bennett

With Self-Portrait with Wings by Chloe Aridjis.

Joan Publishing

Paperback

45 pages

Sometimes it’s very uplifting to feel one’s fleshy boundaries dissolve. To not know where one ends and the world begins. To feel someone's breast is your breast too. Total immersion can be very transporting indeed.

I think Fish Out of Water is about recognition, that extraordinary moment of encountering a work of art that makes you reel because it seems to beckon you, to know what you once did but have had to forget, to lead you back to yourself but as a stranger. It reminds us that we might well arrive in this world too soon, or the wrong way round, and what’s meant to nourish us might choke us, but we were never long for all that, anyway. There’s still chance to recover ourselves and the world as new and totally strange. - Jennifer Hodgson

Looking at art is not a straightforward experience; neither is summing up an artist’s life. Claire-Louise Bennett’s crackling, vivid prose is full of images, associations, feelings and analysis – an extraordinary evocation of a great artist by a great writer. - Jennifer Higgie

Bennett and Aridjis do as great art writing does—they free Tanning’s art from its origins and from the parameters of the frame, refuse it as a fixed entity, and then imbricate its surface like the tide lapping at the shore, leaving residues, washing things away, and depositing new materials. - Rose Higham Stainton

Fish Out of Water was originally published in 2020 by Juxta Press, Milan, as part of their Words for Portraits series. This new edition also contains Self-Portrait with Wings, a response to the text by Chloe Aridjis.