The essay by Alice Butler is one of three writing commissions made for the publication Transition, Transformation, Transience, marking the launch of The Wapping Project Commissions – a new scheme supporting production of new works across film, photography, installation, music and literature – in 2016. The brief to the writers was to respond to the themes of transition, transformation and transience: themes central to The Wapping Project’s history and experience.
The Peach Slip
Alice Butler
Alice Butler is an interdisciplinary scholar and art writer working across feminist art history, feminist theory, and art writing practice. She is the 2021/2022 Terra Foundation Centre for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow and she also teaches in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art. She has previously held fellowships with the Paul Mellon Centre, the Freud Museum London, and the AHRC. Recent publications include the article “‘Have you tried it with three? Have you?’ Ann Quin, Love Triangles, and the Affects of Art/Writing,” in Capacious: A Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry (2021) and the essay “Fan Letters of Love,” in Fandom as Methodology: A Sourcebook for Artists and Writers (2019). She has also recently published essays in the art writing anthologies ON CARE (2020) and ON FIGURE/S (2021). She is currently finalising work on a number of book projects, including a monograph on the sick desires and pleasures of Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller’s interdisciplinary art writing, and a collection of essays, articles, and dialogues on gesture in feminist art and writing, within which she will be publishing new research on Francesca Woodman’s photography and autoeroticism. This intersects with a new project on the interrelation of textiles, sickness, and perversion, as represented and performed in feminist art practices, that she is researching during her Fellowship at the Centre for American Art.