Nicholas Kenyon

Matthew Harle

Tom Overton

the Barbican Centre

Building Utopia

James Machin

Exploring Penda's Fen, a 1974 BBC film that achieved mythic status. In 1974, the BBC broadcast the film Penda's Fen, leaving audiences mystified and spellbound. “Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night,” The Times declared the next morning. Written by the playwright and classicist David Rudkin, the film follows Stephen, an 18-year-old boy, whose identity, sexuality, and suffocating nationalism unravels through a series of strange visions. After its original broadcast, Penda's Fen vanished into unseen mythic status, with only a single rebroadcast in 1990 sustaining its cult following. With a DVD release by the BFI in 2016, Penda's Fen has now become totemic for those interested in Britain's deep history, folklore, and landscape. Of Mud and Flame brings together writers, artists, and historians to excavate and explore this unique cornerstone of Britain's uncanny archive. Contributors include David Rudkin, Sukhdev Sandhu, Roger Luckhurst, Gareth Evan, Adam Scovell, Bethany Whalley, Carl Phelpstead, David Ian Rabey, David Rolinson, Craig Wallace, Daniel O'Donnell Smith, William Fowler, Yvonne Salmon, Andy W. Smith, Carolyne Larrington, John Harle, Timothy J. Jarvis, Tom White, Daniel Eltringham, Joseph Brooker, Gary Budden

A Penda's Fen Sourcebook

Of Mud and Flame

Rita Keegan

Documenting the artistic practice of Rita Keegan: from exhibitions at major venues to everyday life as a working Black female artist. From the Bronx to Soho to Brixton, Mirror Reflecting Darkly is an exploration of the artist Rita Keegan's archive collection. Part autobiography and part critical history, it reproduces a cross-section of Keegan's archive, mapping an artistic practice that ranges from her exhibitions at such major museums and galleries as the ICA and the Tate to her curatorship of the Women of Colour Index, a groundbreaking 1987 initiative that documented Black and Asian women artists. It includes records of Keegan's journey through different creative environments of London in the 1980s and 1990s, offering rare ephemera drawn from her involvement in the Black British Art movement, covering her years as a fixture of Soho clubland, and documenting the intimate traces of her everyday life as a working Black female artist. Accompanying the selections from the archive are essays and personal reflections from a range of writers, academics and artists--including Keegan herself--which expand upon the themes from the material: networks of creative kinship, the story of British Black Arts, self-archiving, and archiving as activism.

The Rita Keegan Archive

Mirror Reflecting Darkly

Afterlives of Abandoned Work considers the relevance of unfinished projects to literary history and criticism, looking beyond famous posthumous work to investigate the abandoned everyday, from scrapped plans and rejected ideas to half-written novels or unfinished artistic works. It traces how the reading of abandoned creative endeavor-whether arriving in the form of a rejection letter, a disagreement with a collaborator, or the simple act of walking away from one's desk-can change the way we think about cultural production, the creative process, and the intellectual construction of everyday life. Over five distinct journeys through a variety of archives, from major research libraries to the unique collections of individual enthusiasts, Matthew Harle draws surprising connections between literary studies, media studies, and visual arts, exploring unfinished projects from Thomas Pynchon, Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, and others. Rooted in literary criticism, Afterlives of Abandoned Work reads unbuilt buildings, unfilmed screenplays, and unpublished novels and radio sketches as forms of text that can help us consider the enduring fragmentation and anecdotal construction of cultural form, as well as expand literary criticism's approach to the archive.

Creative Debris in the Archive

Afterlives of Abandoned Work

Matthew Harle

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