Category: Culture

By Lucy Atkinson

There’s something about George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass that feels uncannily British — not the old empire kind of British, but the rain-soaked, quietly resilient, half-resigned version. Released in 1970, the triple album came out just as the country began to feel the slow ache of decline: post-Beatles, post-utopia, post-swinging-sixties London. Even its title felt like an elegy for a fading Britain. 

Fifty-five years later, the sentiment lands harder than ever. All Things Must Pass now plays like a requiem for a country trying to convince itself it’s still special — a soundtrack for the long, unglamorous hangover after the party of empire, of cool Britannia. 

When Harrison wrote All Things Must Pass, he wasn’t being cynical. He was being spiritual. He’d seen the machinery of fame and ego up close and come out the other side searching for something gentler, truer. The song’s calm acceptance of “sunrise doesn’t last all morning” felt like wisdom at a time when Britain still thought the sixties might never end. But in 2025, it sounds more like a prophecy. It seems like the sun’s been setting for a while now. 

Public services are crumbling, rivers are filling with sewage, and politics has become performance art for bitter men with microphones. Reform UK gains traction by promising renewal but selling racial resentment; Labour promises competence, not hope, yet fails to deliver on both. Everyone’s tired, and the rain keeps falling. 

Harrison’s voice, patient and forgiving, may hum through the noise like a counterpoint: It’s not always going to be this grey. But yet, it is — for now. 

Britain has always excelled at melancholy. We make poetry of drizzle and drama of decline. From The Waste Land to The Crown, we aestheticise decay until it almost looks romantic. Harrison, though, wasn’t interested in performance. His melancholy wasn’t self-pitying; it was cleansing. He offered resignation not as despair, but as liberation, which is a lesson the modern political class could use. Today’s leaders — Farage shouting from a pub, ministers performing contrition on breakfast TV — cling to power like it’s still 2012, still possible to summon optimism with a slogan. “Levelling Up” has become a punchline; “British values”, a meme. 

Harrison would have recognised this noise for what it is: pure ego. 

Beware of Darkness, one of the album’s most haunting tracks, could be mistaken for a sermon to the electorate. “Beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go.” In 1970, that might have sounded like Eastern mysticism. In 2025, it’s practically the daily news cycle. 

The album was partially recorded at Friar Park, Harrison’s eccentric gothic estate, and the iconic album cover was shot there — half-mansion, half-monastery. The walls, lined with gargoyles and silence, gave him the distance to write a work of self-reflection, something Britain rarely manages. Today, the country feels like it’s still living in that house — ornate, damp, haunted by the past. We’ve filled the rooms with nostalgia: wartime mythologies, royal weddings, Great British Bake-Offs. It’s charming, but it’s also claustrophobic. Every institution, from Parliament to the BBC, feels like it’s decaying in slow motion.

Harrison’s mantra — all things must pass — isn’t just an observation; it’s an instruction. Empires fall. Economies falter. Cultures shift. The task isn’t to stop it happening, but to let it happen, and then begin again. 

But Britain doesn’t let go. We polish the relics instead. 

But for one moment, imagine if we actually took Harrison seriously — if the country released its grip on the fantasy of exceptionalism. Reform UK wouldn’t exist; it depends on the illusion that decline is reversible, that we can simply vote our way back to the 1950s. Nor would the endless nostalgia industry that props up our media — the monarchy, the Blitz spirit, the Beatles themselves — work without the promise that the past can be restored. 

Harrison’s message was the opposite: transcendence through impermanence. Growth through surrender. The idea that endings aren’t failure, but natural order, and maybe that’s the radical politics we need now — not rage, not revival, but acceptance. To look honestly at what’s rotting and stop pretending it can be repainted. 

Listening to All Things Must Pass in 2025 Britain feels like stepping outside the chaos for a moment. The songs drift like prayer — full of humility, humour, resignation. Harrison’s slide guitar sounds like light breaking through fog. It’s an album that insists, even amid decay, on grace. 

And perhaps that’s the hope we’re left with. Not a new golden age, but a quieter one — where kindness outlasts the slogans, where humility replaces bluster, where we stop shouting about greatness and start doing small good things. 

Because if Harrison was right — if all things must pass — then this too will. The populism, the cruelty, the endless decline. The question is what we’ll build in the silence that follows. 

Until then, the rain keeps falling. The records keep spinning. And somewhere, faintly, George Harrison’s voice reminds us: 

“All things must pass away.”

Featured Image: Barry Feinstein

By Sam Unsworth

It is a more than well-known fact that there is simply nothing new in fashion; all is a rehash upon rehash of older ideas, cuts, and silhouettes- with the exception perhaps of fabric. Nonetheless, it is still interesting to examine the comparisons we can draw with the past and how these may hint at the ways in which fashion may evolve in the future. This article will focus on men’s fashion with all the authority of someone who watches too many films, looks at too many clothes, and picks up some of Hardy Amies’ books from time to time. In my opinion, the 1930s arguably saw the peak of the suit. Focused on both style and practicality, the thirties flowed with softness and ease of wear in its fashion. Broad shoulders and well-fitting garments designed to exude confidence and effortlessness, and most importantly, simplicity. This, I believe, is seeing a revival in the style of the everyday man’s wardrobe, as well as among stars on red carpets across the globe. 

The first thing that occurred to me was what YouTuber James Leung refers to as the “2025 uniform”. This, as one is probably aware, tends to involve larger, wide-legged trousers paired with a well-cut t-shirt and some form of polished boot or shoe. Now, how exactly does this reflect the 1930s? Well, the ease of this type of outfit and the emphasis on basic, comfortable clothing are clear indicators. If we were to examine the suits common in early 1930s Germany, we would encounter loose-fitting trousers that flowed neatly down from the waist, usually accompanied by pleats. These loose trousers permitted a clean break above the shoe, a feature often mirrored in contemporary fashion. This, however, was not restricted to Germany- rather reflecting a shift toward practicality within men’s fashion in a post-Wall Street crash world where men would have less time for leisure and would look to own curated items that would last comfortably, whilst also retaining some of the finery of the 1920s. 

Furthermore, the influence of The Great Depression saw an increase in workwear being utilised more openly- with the serial production of French chore coats by the likes of Le Laboureur and Vetra, allowing working-class fashion to evolve further in Europe (If you want to know more about Le Laboureur, I would recommend Albert Musquiz’s YouTube channel). In the USA, there was also a boom in workwear fashion, with Levi’s and Carhartt gaining nationwide prominence with the emergence of the first Carhartt jacket, the “Engineer Sack Coat,” in 1925. Workwear in fashion is not restricted to the 2020s; however, there is a clear increase in the sourcing of pre-loved or softened workwear for incorporation into the fashion world, which has led to online trolling of individuals for ironically having “soft hands” while donning traditional workwear, arguably demeaning and accessorising its blue-collar roots. US workwear appears to be in high demand at present, consistent with a broader pattern of US influence, particularly through film stars, celebrities, and social media influencers. 

A key focus must also be placed on the cut of suits and trousers. Gone are the days of oversized and baggy apparel; people instead want well-fitted clothing that accentuates their bodily features most prominently from the waist up – perhaps aligning with an increased focus on health and fitness within influencer circles. In the earlier example of the t-shirt and larger trousers, there is a clear distinction between being ‘larger’ and being ‘baggy’. These large trousers still sit tightly at the waist, usually in a high-to-medium waist fit. Notably, these trousers often do not require a belt to cinch any excess material; instead, an increasing number of designers are reverting to systems such as English side straps or Gurkha waistbands. This is well modelled by the likes of actor Jacob Elordi, who often wears double-breasted suits that reinforce 1930s-style motifs. As such, the cut of these trousers appears to model that of the 1930s, with larger yet well-fitted garments that accentuate one’s waist whilst also adding volume to the legs. On a personal note, I believe this is a welcome step away from the tight Tom Ford suits of the 2010s, which I, for one, hope do not come back into fashion. 

Finally, a note on t-shirts and jackets. In this case, I will use Mutimer as an example. Currently,  Mutimer is really the driving brand in men’s fashion beyond the runway, with sleek silhouettes that lend themselves to everyday use and styling, offering a sense of effortlessness whilst also retaining a put-together look. Hardy Amies famously wrote, “A man should look as if he has bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care and then forgotten all about them,” and I believe this to be clear within Mutimer’s brand vision. They recently released a new T-shirt labelled “The Jagger T-shirt”, faithful to the cut and shape of its namesake, Mick Jagger, yet adopting shorter sleeves and a tighter fit- it does away with the boxy tees popularised by skate fashion, instead aligning with the 2025 uniform, accentuating your features with a simple, unabashed silhouette. Much like the fit of Marlon Brando’s t-shirt in Streetcar. This can also be seen in jackets; the Mutimer leather jacket, conveniently always sold out, features a cropped fit typical of most biker jackets, yet also contributes a snug waist reminiscent of military styles of the late 30s and 40s, such as the No.5 battledress or General Jim Gavin’s modified officers’ jacket. 

There are many comparisons to draw, but I believe that overall, a 1930s style revival is totally beneficial to men’s fashion as it blends practicality, comfort, and elegance, in turn allowing the wearer to curate a more long- lasting wardrobe not driven by fast fashion but rather by timeless classics which focus more heavily on fit rather than flair. 

Image credit : The Telegraph

By Matthew Dodd

Consider the train. There is, perhaps, no greater symbol of the industrial age, of mankind’s advancement from agrarian primitivists to mechanised modernists than the hulking mammoth of steam and steel, rattling through sceptred fields and countryside. It permeates the psyche of modern society; the great communitarian dream that we might, united by rail, draw nations and continents together as one. Even as its atomistic rival, the dreaded motorcar, threatens its position, it remains a potent image of our contemporary world, and the hope of what it might be. No wonder, then, that it has seeped so heavily into the language of visual storytelling. The train is, like the telephone booth or the six-shooter, one of those enduringly anomalous staples of the moving image. How else to tear lovers apart or prompt random meetings across a train carriage? For over a century, since cinema’s very conception, the train has been an indispensable tool of symbolic relevance, a tool too often overlooked as merely perfunctory. In considering and unwinding the manifold resonances of the train on film, we might come to a better understanding of just how spiritually relevant this marvel of invention truly is.

Britain’s cultural consciousness, to its great disadvantage, lacks the figure of the cowboy. Where American national storytelling may always fall back on the image of the brooding sheriff traipsing endless flatlands on horseback, Britain is forced to recede deep into its medieval past to find any similarly entrancing historical archetypes. Perhaps, then, we supplant the train as our own kind of cowboy. A post-industrial mammoth, stoic and unfeeling, rounding the hills and valleys with unitary purpose. 1936’s Night Mail, a documentary – perhaps the first in Britain’s cinematic history – charting the progress of the overnight postal train, accompanied by a specially commissioned W.H. Auden poem and Benjamin Britten score, certainly makes this argument. The train hurtles from London to Scotland, an egalitarian troubadour at the nation’s service: ‘letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner, the girl next door’. Workers tirelessly sort through envelopes, placing each on specially chalked town-specific shelves. Mailbags are yanked from hooks by purpose-built nets at passing stations with a mechanical, stolid brutality. Auden’s poem is set to the metre of the train’s passage, a relentless onslaught of brusque couplets, dispassionately toasting the broad cross-section of British life past which the engine runs – ‘letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts, letters to Scotland from the South of France’. That the film, produced by the Post Office so as to increase public perception of the service and to dissuade the challenge of privatisation, should choose to tie the figure of the postal engine into this poetic system is something of a small wonder. This is no mere advertisement, but an argument for the incontrovertible necessity of the railway to British life. Across Night Mail, the railways become veins through which the blood of the nation runs. The train is positioned as a uniquely British kind of hero: deferential, resolute. The documentary serves as a hymn to this unsung champion of modernity. There is a note of George Eliot about the whole thing, an industrial echo of Middlemarch’s closing paragraphs: that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number of locomotives which have run a hidden service from Euston to Aberdeen and rest in unvisited depots. 

The conclusion of Night Mail, the poem and the film, is a revelation about the fundamental importance of the postal network, its manifold powers of connection, and thus the train’s ultimate duty in serving the people of Britain their correspondence, ‘for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’. Films such as Night Mail, state-funded promotions for a nationalised train network, speak to a dream of post-war British connectivity: a nation at one with itself, bridged by a selfless and noble fleet of knightly engines running, unthanked, across the country. The final such film, a sequel to Night Mail, was produced in 1988, directed by Chariots of Fire’s Hugh Hudson and scored by Vangelis, with additional stanzas added to Auden’s poem. This modern version placed emphasis on the scope of British Rail’s commuter classes, drawing together, once more, the mess of British life intertwined by the railway: ‘the teacher, the doctor, the actor in farce, the typist, the banker, the judge in first class. Reading The Times with the crossword to do, returning at night on the six forty-two’. The film, the last to be made pre-privatisation, ends on the still image of an elderly couple reuniting with their children and grandchildren at the platform’s edge, overlaid with the slogan ‘Britain’s Railway’. 

The train’s stoical connotations give rise, by turn, to a rich romantic resonance. In 1899, two silent films entitled The Kiss in the Tunnel were produced, the first by George Albert Smith and the second by Bamforth and Company. Neither are especially complex works of cinema, featuring nothing more than establishing shots of a train entering and leaving a tunnel, as well as an interposed scene of a couple stealing a kiss in the darkness of the carriage. Between the two films, the only major difference is that Bamforth’s – known for their salacious seaside postcards – significantly increased the passion of the couple’s kiss. By combining the couple’s scene with those of the train entering and leaving the tunnel, Smith’s film represented the arrival of narrative editing in filmmaking. In its way, this minor locomotive love affair invented the very notion of narrative cinema. For over a century, then, the intrigue of the engine – the jeopardy of the darkened train tunnel, the intimacy of the compartment – has brought forth its romantic quality to the moving image. 

In his seminal new wave classic Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy mounts his camera to the moving train which tears young lovers Guy and Genevieve apart. Genevieve recedes into the horizon as the train/camera removes Guy inexorably from her. The train, for the lovers, represents the inevitable: a separation as unfeeling and unshakeable as a railway timetable. Thus, the train becomes a method of industrial timekeeping, hours measured out by the comings and goings of engines and carriages. Meetings and affairs are cut short by the necessity of catching a train, a train representative of the outside world – a marriage avoided or a life escaped. Such is the case in Brief Encounter, David Lean and Noel Coward’s masterpiece of post-war British filmmaking. When Laura, the despondent housewife, and Alec, the kind-hearted dentist, meet by chance in a picturehouse, it is the waiting room of Milford Railway Station which becomes their sanctuary: an Edenic place of stillness, free from the rigidity of that real life represented in the arrival of the train. Whilst there, in that liminal space between destinations, they have a kind of freedom, yet a freedom which is ever worn down by the movement of their respective trains towards their station. It is, once more, the train that separates them from one another, and the fear of missing a connection which robs the pair of a real goodbye. The engines represent the reality to these romantic fantasies, tying us invariably to a world which works strictly to timetables and appointments which must be met. As in Night Mail, there is something decidedly British in the character of these trains, apathetic in the annihilation of high-flown romance. The lovers, whose respective worlds are obliterated by their separation, must move on dispassionately, catch the next train, and continue their lives.

The logical counterpoint to the heartbreak of the railway connection is found in Richard Linklater’s sprawling epic of love and transport, the Before trilogy, a cycle that dwells resolutely in the space between trains, and probes the danger of disrupting the regular flow of the timetable. In Before Sunrise, the young ramblers Jesse and Celine – a wandering American 20-something and a French university student – catch eyes across a train carriage bound for Vienna. They exchange reading materials, get to talking, and decide to delay their respective commitments by a day, hop off in Vienna and spend a night together. They amble through the city, falling in a kind of condensed love – the kind of love that perhaps works best with an established time limit – before being borne away by their respective trains. They promise at the platform to meet again in the same spot, in one year’s time. Eight years later, Before Sunset picks up their narrative with the two meeting again for the first time since their lone night together. Erring slightly away from the world of the train, their reunion is marked by a real-time countdown to Jesse’s return flight to America. Surely, were a direct rail route between Paris and Los Angeles established, Linklater would’ve used it here. Nevertheless, the film goes to great lengths to accentuate that kind of rigid timekeeping interposed by a train (plane, in this case) timetable, counting out minutes under the stress of a connection to be caught. The revelatory, subversive decision made at the end of the film, when Jesse elects to lounge in Celine’s apartment at the expense of his flight becomes a transcendentally romantic disruption of the mode of industrial timekeeping. Rather than play his role as modern man, zipping to an airport gate and dashing through security, Jesse does the radical opposite: he wastes time. ‘Baby,’ Celine tells him, ‘you are gonna miss that plane.’ When Jesse, with a coy smile, looks up and says ‘I know’, it is as a man broken free from the oppression of the timetable and, by extension, the outside world. 

Consider, then, when next you race for the TransPennine express or collapse into a seat on the LNER service from Newcastle to Edinburgh, that you are engaged in a sacred communion with an industrial object riven with soaring notes of romance and melancholy. You are the mechanical cowboy, the lovesick housewife; the railways the canvas of your own story. Consider the train. 

Featured Image: O. Winston Link Museum Archives Collection

By Aliza Hussain 

It’s 1990, and a 28-year-old Meera Syal walks into Channel 4 commissioner Karin Bambrough’s office with a modest pitch: a comedy about a coachload of British Asian women on a day trip to Blackpool, lifted straight from the outings she used to take with her aunties. She gets about five minutes in before  Bambrough cuts her off with a ‘Mmh, sounds great,’ and greenlights it on the spot. 

At some point during the past decade and a half, we seem to have decided that  the 1990s were a golden age. I’m sick to death of the compulsory nostalgia  loop, but when I hear my parents talking about their youth again, I can’t help  but understand the mythology. The picture comes quickly. It’s the mid 90’s and  you’re young and South Asian in London; it was only twenty-five years ago  that your parents started from scratch in Hounslow, cursing the bare knees  and booze. You grow up not allowed to speak English in the house and wear  your first pair of jeans at the ripe age of seventeen. But that all didn’t matter  now, they were remixing your music and playing it at Ministry of Sound, you  had Talvin Singh winning the Mercury Prize, Apache Indian and Cornershop  on MTV. Nights like Anokha at the Blue Note and Outcaste at Heaven pulled in  mixed crowds. You could buy T-shirts from Club Kali, read about Goodness  Gracious Me in The Face, and hear a dhol loop sampled on Radio 1. For the  first time, the British Asian sensibility felt legible to itself, there was a humour  built on self-consciousness, that diasporic reflex to pre-empt the gaze, to mock  what you love before someone else does. With this came a wave of British  Asian filmmaking that was stylistically self-authored, produced by artists  operating in a space with no market to please.  

Syal’s 1993 Bhaji on the Beach follows a coachload of British Asian women  heading from Birmingham to Blackpool, a trip rendered with warmth and  acuity, and what sounds like a throwaway premise comes, in director  Gurinder Chadha’s hands, a kind of moving chamber piece. The film gathers  women at different stages of life and lets their fault lines rub up against one  another: Asha, whose dutiful calm keeps slipping into lush Bollywood reveries,  Ginder, brittle with the knowledge she might not survive her marriage,  Hashida, gifted and frightened in equal measure, and the older women, who seem so sure of their authority it’s easy to miss the deep fear humming  underneath. 

Blackpool, with its rain slick neon and end-of-the-pier melancholy becomes a  kind of diasporic purgatory, and, like David Leland’s Wish You Were Here or  Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, Chadha understands the British seaside as a  liminal space, a landscape that reveals the tension between who the women  are and who they might briefly imagine themselves to be. Chada leans into this  tension formally too, with the deliberately clashing colour palette  externalising how the British and diasporic world never blend, only rubbing  and scraping against one another. Saris flare violently under the North Sea  light, and we are left with a sensory excess that becomes a kind of emotional  distortion, with the environment exaggerating the feelings the women have  learned to mute at home. We see this most clearly in the fairground mirror  scene, where Hashida, pregnant by Oliver, a Black man her family would  never accept, finds her crisis reflected back at her in warped glass, a private  fear becoming theatrically public, with the carnival brightness stretching it  into something almost surreal. 

Ultimately, the cheap magic of Blackpool drains away, leaving the women  back on a Birmingham pavement with nothing resolved, only with the film’s  ending leaving us with the salty aftertaste of a long day. Chadha rejects the  tidy dramaturgy of a social-issue film; her ending is closer to the British New  Wave’s open wounds, but with a reconfigured centre of gravity. Instead of the  working-class man railing against the system, we get women whose interior  lives have simply been made visible, and that visibility is its own form of  political charge. The movie’s themes; double lives, cultural drift, the  choreography of belonging, have since become familiar to the point of cliché,  but only because Syal and Chadha made them possible. 

Around the same time, Hanif Kureishi was scripting My Beautiful Laundrette,  folding Thatcherite greed and queer desire into one clammy Soho bedsit; Asif  Kapadia was reshaping the British epic with The Warrior; and Chadha herself  would soon make it to the mainstream with Bend It Like Beckham. These films,  emerging under the flush of Cool Britannia, were made possible by conditions  that now feel unreal. Public broadcasters still believed in cultural risk;  Channel 4’s minority-voices remit had teeth, the UK Film Council was throwing real money at first-time writers, and London, under the soft-touch optimism of  early New Labour, was busy selling itself as Europe’s great multicultural  experiment. But that civically confident Britain is gone, and what replaced it  could not be less hospitable to that kind of filmmaking. The broader guttering  of working-class film culture, youth theatres, public bursaries, regional  workshops, took this locally rooted, auteur-driven style of British Asian  cinema down with it. What remains isn’t absence but attenuation. It’s not hard  to spot a British Asian face in Netflix’s new wave of London-set diaspora  romances; charming, energetic, but speaking the lingua franca of a global  market where representation is inherently branding. And of course,  immigration has become a permanent election-cycle bogeyman. We’ve lost the  sense of a world built from the inside, and what’s taken its place is a cinema  that performs identity outwardly. It’s telling that the two of the most  interesting British Asian figures of the past decade, Riz Ahmed and Dev Patel,  became themselves elsewhere. Ahmed’s most radical work has been funded  across the Atlantic; Patel’s most substantial roles have come from directors  who aren’t British at all. Their talent is unmistakable, but it has flourished in a  vacuum. Britain grows the artists; it no longer grows the conditions that let  them tell stories at home, and in a landscape where fewer artists can afford to  begin in the margins, this realist, first-generation strand of filmmaking has  dissipated.  

This is where the 90s return in sharper relief. That brief British Asian cultural  boom; the fusion records, the fashion, the films made from inside the  community rather than at its expense was an infrastructure. A moment when  Britain was porous enough, and publicly funded enough, for new voices to  shape the culture rather than just appear within it, as Syal once did. Its  disappearance matters less as a pang of nostalgia than as diagnosis: proof of  how thoroughly we’ve dismantled the conditions that once made artistic risk  possible.

Featured Image: BFI

By Honor Adams

I first encountered Aubrey Beardsley in a solid red shop on Oxford’s fading high street. Amid draws of outdated maps and horticultural prints, his intricately simple woodblock prints began to creep out. Black and white visions writhed into life – their elegance tinged with irony, excess and restraint. 

Within the quiet confines of Saunders of Oxford, I found myself entranced, flicking through each leaf of shocking, ironic, and playful illustrations, where line and curve dissolved into a theatre of desire and defiance. Poised between the quaint and the transgressive, my experience felt like an initiation into the strange allure of the fin de siècle. 

Shocking the modern viewer has become increasingly difficult in the progression of contemporary art. However, Beardsley’s fictitious illustrations snipped from Wilde’s Salomè, Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur or The Savoy, left me gawking through a window into the world of Victorian England. For Beardsley, audacity was a simply humorous exercise; continuing a tradition of political and societal mockery. And as with any contentious creation, objections were, and remain, multiplicitous.

Beardsley’s grotesque, scandalous, and immoral subject matters gave him the attention he desperately desired. The bulk of his illustrations depict women, many of whom embodied deviance and corruption in the eyes of the conservative Victorian reviewer. Beardsley drew upon the taboos of the era, forming a subversive commentary on societal norms. Synchronous to his short working life, the feminist ideal of the ‘New Woman’ was salient, a term coined by the novelist, Sarah Grand, in 1894. These ‘New Women’ challenged values already being attacked by fin-de-siècle modernism and the societally deviant dandies of the Decadent movement. Women demanding social opportunities and emancipation were boxed into the same category as prostitutes or the promiscuous. Rather than attacking such unruliness, Beardsley mocks the ludicrousness of a dated categorization, gaining attention whilst revealing his progressive mindset. Despite backlash, gender was being redefined, and Beardsley harnessed such change as a platform for recognition and contentiousness. 

Subversive subject matters and a tendency towards sexualised themes were often associated with his infliction of ‘consumption’ (Tuberculosis), a bizarre 19^th-century perception with no medical affirmation. Ironically, with continually poor health, Beardsley turned to Catholicism and rejected his previous work on the subject. 

The question of Beardsley’s own sexuality, or his advocacy for homosexuality more generally, has been debated. Despite this debate, his early death and contemporary taboos prevented any conclusions on his part. Linda Gertner Zatlin argues that he “advocated neither homosexuality, androgyny, nor heterosexuality”. Although, I would contend that his true nature or beliefs can never be uncovered, and any speculations produce no valuable theory. His work remains sexually ambiguous on a personal level, presenting us with a distinctly asexual depiction of Victorian taboos. The fluidity within his work was rare by Victorian standards, but the artist’s lack of comment on such matters reveals little of himself other than a liberal and risqué attitude. What cannot be doubted is that Beardsley was an eccentric dandy (a contemporarily mesmerising characteristic) and his confrontation of evolving issues came at a turning point in women’s and sexual history. 

“I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing” Aubrey Beardsley, 1897. 

Beardsley initially drew inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites, taking motivation from his desire for fame and encouraged by his mother’s expectations. He followed the works of William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones. A shared interest in the medieval, symbolic subjects, as well as a rejection of contemporary art, drew Beardsley to these characters. Burne-Jones specifically acted as a mentor, strongly supporting his initial work. However, Beardsley grew tired of his Morte d’Arthur commission and the two diverged as the illustrator began to embrace his own more individualistic and increasingly erotic style. Morris held an unsupportive stance from the outset, leading to Beardsley breaking away from the Pre-Raphaelites and migrating towards a Parisian clique, further alienating British reviewers. The xenophobic normality of the late 19^th-century criticised his French connections and grumbled over the otherness of his Japanese style. Nonetheless, contemporary judgment was not universally negative, and the elegance of his line and precise decorative style landed praise from several critics, including Joseph Penell.

His hard-edged line forced his work to become visually aggressive. Contradictions weave throughout, blending elegance, classicism and purity of line while meshing between the scandalous and perverse. The result is a definite visual power. The line block technique and Japanese influence remain a thread throughout Beardsley’s work, allowing for its mass reproduction at a time when printed culture was particularly prevalent. Beardsley pushed back against the self-proclaimed cultural superiority of the British art scene, lacing ironic and mocking messages into his work. In contrast, Japanese artistic practice didn’t acknowledge erotic or sexual themes in the same disgust as the Victorian Brit. Distinct parallels can be drawn both in style and motif to artists such as Kitagawa Utamaro or Katsushika Hokusai. Prints such as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (Hokusai) or Lovers in the Upstairs of a Teahouse (Utamaro) portray undisguised sexualised themes far more shameless than those of Beardsley and almost a century earlier. 

Irony and satire weren’t unknown to the British media, and Beardsley himself often found himself the brunt of such commentary.  Beardsley and his subversive advocacy saw him riddled with salacious scandal in the eyes of Victorian England. A poem from April 1894 in Punch magazine mocked the artist in a distinctly fin-de-siècle way:

Mr Aubrey Beer de Beers,
You’re getting quite a high renown;
Your Comedy of Leers,
You know,
Is posted all about the town;
This sort of stuff I cannot puff,
As Boston says, it makes me “tired”;
Your Japanee-Rossetti girl
Is not a thing to be desired.
Mr Aubrey Beer De Beers, 
New English Art (excuse the chaff)
Is like the Newest Humour style,
It’s not a thing at which to laugh;
…
(Owen Seaman: “Let’s Ave A Nue Poster” (Punch, 21 April 1894, p. 189))

In April 1895, two weeks following the arrest of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley was fired from his position as art editor of The Yellow Book. Wilde was thought to be carrying a copy of the controversial periodical during his arrest. This was revealed to be simply a yellow-bound French novel, and the two men’s relationship was by now hardly amicable. However, the need to disassociate Wilde’s scandals from the periodical cost Beardsley his job. The Book’s sales fell with his illustrations no longer adorning the pages of Decadent writings. Beardsley is often associated with the life and literature of Wilde, and whilst his work depicted the society that Wilde inhabited, Beardsley’s creations hold their own gravity. 

By 1898, Beardsley’s health had deteriorated. An awareness of his impending death led to his conversion to Catholicism. Before he died, he wrote to his publisher, Leonard Smithers, to dispose of his work Lysistrata and many other shocking pieces. This request, for the sake of artistic appreciation and historical study, I am glad was never completed. Aubrey Beardsley’s career spanned less than 7 years, dying of Tuberculosis in 1898. He will forever be associated with The Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde and the controversial characters of Victorian Britain’s evolving society. For those who, like me, find themselves flicking through Beardsley’s work in an antique print shop, it is evident that his work has impacted far more than just a yellow bound book.

Featured Image: Tate Britain

By Lucy Atkinson

There’s a moment on every student’s walk to a 9am lecture- mist hanging low over the river, your headphones in, tote bag swinging, when you catch your reflection in a café window and think: yes. This is cinema. 

You’re the protagonist. The world revolves around your inner monologue. You are misunderstood, artfully exhausted, and probably wearing something that attempts to look like it was stolen from a 1970s film student. 

Then the bus splashes you. The moment’s gone—the soundtrack cuts. You’re suddenly an extra again — damp, anonymous, and late for French grammar.  

We are a generation raised on The Main Character Moment. TikTok taught us that any walk can be romantic if you tilt the camera up 10 degrees and add some Phoebe Bridgers. Instagram captions whisper, “romanticise your life.” Pinterest boards promise “dark academia” as if tragedy and stress were an aesthetic rather than a cruel reality. The result? A cultural obsession with being seen, even if no one’s actually watching – the art and behaviour of constant performance.  

It’s tempting to laugh at it — the earnestness, the self-mythologising — but this desire for narrative coherence isn’t new. Virginia Woolf did it with stream-of-consciousness; Baudelaire did it in a crowd. As Joan Didion famously wrote in The  White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The main character complex is simply our generation’s spin on that instinct — to turn chaos into continuity, to edit experience into meaning, more often than not through the lens of social media.  

Didion’s insight lands differently in the era of the front-facing camera. We still tell ourselves stories in order to live, but now we do so publicly, performatively, with filters, and the perfectly chosen snippets of songs in our stories. We construct our lives like screenplays — plot arcs, redemption moments, personal soundtracks — as though meaning can be manufactured through aesthetics alone. 

Didion goes on to say, 

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” 

It is human nature to romanticise the tragic and mundane. And now, more than ever,  it is expected to do so for the viewing pleasure, or envy, of others. As Didion states,  we are affected by “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience”. 

But what once felt like an act of defiance — the assertion of interiority, and the forceful reigning of the self’s own ‘story’ — now feels like a performance review.  How’s my narrative arc going? Am I developing as a character? Have I had my midpoint crisis yet? Ultimately, how do people view me? What am I worth if people don’t see my aesthetic? 

To be a main character today is to curate the illusion of intimacy. It’s to drink an overpriced flat white and pretend it’s plot-relevant. To view a breakdown as nothing  more than “character development.” To confuse aesthetic coherence with emotional authenticity. 

And yet, beneath the irony, there’s something tender in the attempt. To romanticise one’s own life is, at its core, to refuse invisibility. Maybe filming your sunset walk isn’t narcissism, but a tiny rebellion against banality. Perhaps the self that’s performed online isn’t fake, but aspirational — a draft of who we’d like to become, a fake-it-till you-make-it projection.  

So perhaps the real question isn’t “Am I main character enough?” but “Am I paying  attention?” 

The main character is not the loudest person in the room — it’s the one who happens to notice the way the light hits the library steps at 4 p.m., the one who finds narrative in the in between. To live like that — alert, romantic, a little ridiculous — might actually be the most honest kind of protagonism there is. 

So yes, maybe you are the main character. Just don’t forget that today, everyone else is too.

Featured Image Credit – Teresa Zabala / NYT / Redux

By Matthew Dodd

As I cowered outside Wembley Park tube station, sheepishly shielding four cans of Carling from the view of patrolling police officers, and watched in semi-intoxicated wonder as a parade of bucket hats flowed towards the stadium, it seemed self-evident that I was observing a national cultural reckoning. Oasis were back. The great bastion of 90s Britishness had returned home to their natural place, extracting millions of pounds from millions of adoring fans. All over the nation, the tidal wave of Adidas Spezials and misjudged haircuts heralded the return of a cultural phenomenon. Across their two hour set, they more than clarified their enduring excellence, the anthemic barrage of power chords and vaguely aspirational lyrics turning thousands of fans – myself, of course, included – into a drunken congregation, joined together in the great fraternity of Gallagher-ism. And yet, this tour didn’t seem to reconsecrate Oasis as the biggest band in Britain. Rather, it seemed to be a reaction to the fact that Oasis still are the biggest band in Britain. Their physical reunion is almost perfunctory; they still occupy the same place at the centre of Britain’s musical ecosystem. Their return three decades on doesn’t toss them into a foreign cultural environment, an antique guitar cable awkwardly plugged into a state-of-the-art amplifier, rather it seems like they never really left.

It’s thirty years exactly since their seminal second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? established Oasis firmly as the pre-eminent British band of the 90s. In the same year, The Beatles Anthology 1 was released, a sprawling multi-media project reflecting on the band’s body of work and legacy, thirty years on from their heyday. Such a project was and remains so interesting because it reacts to how The Beatles shaped the course of popular music, placing them into a totally foreign musical environment – the 1990s – and arguing for their enduring relevance. This year, The Beatles Anthology 2025 is set to be released, a further argument for their continuing influence in an even further removed world. It’s interesting, then, that when Oasis, like their Liverpudlian icons, made their own return after thirty years, it was not to a totally foreign cultural zeitgeist against which theirs was an anomalous presence, but rather to a British musical sphere more amenable to them than ever. Just a year before the reunion, Liam Gallagher had sold out a tour performing Definitely Maybe in full. This isn’t a time-won reflection on an era’s defining music, it is a direct replay of that era. In the three decades between 65 and 95, British rock and roll went from A Hard Day’s Night to Wonderwall; in the three decades since, it’s gone from Wonderwall to Wonderwall again. Bloke-core, a wave of 90s nostalgia, nichetok edits, aAdidas brand deals and the spectre of Radio X continues to propel Oasis into the cultural mainstream, decades after their time. Of course, it isn’t just Oasis at fault. Blur sold out Wembley in 2023; Pulp made headlines at Glastonbury just a few months ago; Radiohead are set to embark on their own blockbuster reunion tour this autumn. These groups persist in shaping our national music conversation. In the 90s, kids queued up for hours to see these godlike bands. In the 2020s, it is the same bands who occupy this space, the same bands kids are queuing up to see. Oasis and their contemporaries continue to dominate Britain’s musical culture in a way that veers beyond reverence and towards stagnation.

Since the end of britpop – somewhere between the release of Oasis’ Be Here Now and Pulp’s This is Hardcore – few British acts have managed to break the mainstream and capture the cultural zeitgest in the same way. The Libertines seemed primed for a time to inherit Oasis’ spot as the tabloid-courting rock n’ roll ascendants before their abrupt implosion after only two albums. Taking a purely commercial view of things, one British band stands out as undoubtedly the most successful since Oasis. That said, as much as we all might like a late-night singalong of Yellow, we can hardly point to Coldplay as the paragons of modern rock. As Super Hans famously noted, ‘people like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people.’ What, then, has happened to the Great British band?

The post-britpop indie movements of the 2000s, what we might broadly call the landfill indie era, was a far less sure thing than its 90s predecessor. Fuelled by the panoptical tabloid furore of NME and its peers, bands were thrown in and out of the spotlight at a breakneck pace. A few names survive – The Fratellis, Kaiser Chiefs, Courteneers – but a whole wave of lesser bands stand, deservedly or undeservedly, forgotten – The Hoosiers, The Paddingtons, Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong, etc. etc. Where the britpop era saw a centralisation of culture, a nation crowded around Oasis and Blur, the landfill period was marked the vast proliferation of upstart outfits. The band who emerged unscathed from the skip, surely the only band to get close to filling Oasis’ vacant seat, is Arctic Monkeys. From grassroots beginnings – both in Sheffield and on the nascent world wide web – and headline-grabbing romances to, most crucially, massively successful and zeitgeist-capturing music, the Monkeys fit the bill more than any band this side of the century. Like Oasis, they remain lodged in the firmament of the contemporary indie scene: you’d be hard pressed to find a teenager with Doc Martens and a superiority complex who doesn’t know A Certain Romance by heart. Unlike Oasis, however, Arctic Monkeys had the boldness to allow their music to grow up with them, to not continue singing about nights out and Smirnoff ices into their fourties. It’s that artistic bravery that has held them back from becoming the nostalgia-fuelled ouroboros Oasis risks turning into. Nevertheless, their mainstream success is indisputable, especially in comparison to their contemporaries. Over their career, every one of Oasis’ eight albums reached number one on the UK charts. Six of Arctic Monkeys’ seven – blame Taylor Swift – achieved the same feat. By contrast, The Kooks and The Wombats have two number one albums between them.

Since the Monkeys swapped guitars for keyboards in the mid 2010s, what has become now the ‘indie’ scene has failed to produce an act to the same level of popular success. In the years since, UK indie has been collapsing into itself and into a nostalgia for the scenes that once were. For many British bands post-landfill and post-britpop, the object has been less to push the genre forward and more to recreate the feeling brought about by those earlier bands. Consequently, we end up with acts like Catfish and the Bottlemen, whose songs seem custom-built to be chanted drunkenly in a field on the shoulders of your best mate from school. There is nobody in the crowd of a Catfish or Inhaler or Reytons gig who wouldn’t rather be watching Oasis in 1994 or Arctic Monkeys in 2007. For at least a decade, the British indie scene has been running on the fumes of those bands, hoping that this year’s Latitude festival might be at least something like Spike Island.

Naturally, this isn’t all the fault of the bands. There are those acts which overtly chase the high of a bygone era of UK indie – The Reytons’ refrain that ‘everybody round here’s got a cousin or a mate who’s best friends with Alex Turner’ is certainly guilty – but there are of course a whole host of those from across the British Isles which are making genuinely new and genuinely brilliant music. Wolf Alice, Black Country New Road, Sportsteam, Black Midi (R.I.P), Fontaines D.C., Stereo Tuesday, English Teacher, Wet Leg, Mary in the Junkyard, Wunderhorse – the list goes on. But in today’s post-Spotify society, music isn’t the centralised thing it once was. Gone are the days when a nation would sit around the television set and let Top of the Pops reveal who the next big thing are. Similarly, the media landscape of the 90s and 2000s does not exist anymore: no NME reporters are on the ground looking for the gossip about Grian Chatten or Ellie Rowsell. Now is the age of the algorithm, the indie zine, the subgenre, the niche. Bands like Black Country, New Road play deliberately to a niche crowd, revelling in the kind of experimentation only possible outside the mainstream. Today’s answer to Oasis or Arctic Monkeys, the kind of bands that headline festivals and sell out small arenas, are still playing to an audience a fraction of the size of their predecessors. Perhaps the biggest band coming out of the British Isles currently, Fontaines D.C. played their largest gig to date in Finsbury Park over the summer. 45,000 turned out, this punter included, to see a mesmeric line-up of new-age superstars. Between Fontaines, Kneecap and Amyl and the Sniffers, the gig felt like a festival in its own right: a statement of intent from a new generation of rock n’ rollers. And yet, whilst Fontaines reaches five million monthly listeners on Spotify, Oasis reach thirty-one million. Therein lies the central paradox: the market for British/Irish indie is apparently a shadow of what it once was, but the market that once was is still listening to Oasis. The days are past when a band of loud-mouthed Mancunians could, with nothing more than some power chords and a tambourine, sell out the largest stadiums in the country for weeks on end. And yet, that’s just what happened this summer.  

The quality of music is there, as is the appetite, yet for the most part the UK music industry is submerged under the corporate hegemony of American pop. When homegrown artists like Olivia Dean or Sam Fender do break through, it feels like an exception rather than a rule. National musical character is, now more than ever, defined by our Atlantic neighbours: what was once a back-and-forth trade – The Rolling Stones for The Beach Boys – is now decidedly one-sided. The internet has, for the most part, homogenised much of our popular music culture. As such, the once dominant British music scene – the scene that produced The Beatles, Bowie and Fleetwood Mac – has faded away, its vestigial remains reforming into the indie scene. It’s that scene which now remains paralysed between 1994 and 2007, forever replaying Live Forever and 505. The money is in surefire hits from Disney channel stars, not local bands playing back-end pubs. This summer hasn’t been a Britpop revival, it’s been a rerun of the last time British music felt truly relevant. In other words, it’s been a Britpop summer for thirty years. Until the indie scene can get out of its britpop stupor, until the music industry pays attention to the upstarts and, most decidedly, until audiences listen, our national music scene, once our great pride, risks remaining forever stuck in the past and the great British band, one of our finest national exports, risks becoming history. All is not lost, however. Just last year, Charli XCX’s Brat made pretending to be British cool again (see: The Dare) and the continued success of artists like Raye and Olivia Dean point to a revival in the UK’s pop-soul scene. Whether a phallocentric music establishment would accept the new faces of British music as female is another matter entirely. Nevertheless, we can but wait for the next great British band to arrive and tear Radio X asunder. Oasis spoke to a dispossessed post-Thatcher Britain about living forever, chasing the sun, feeling supersonic; about years falling by like rain and dreams being real. If ever there was a time for a band like Oasis, it’s now.

Featured Image: Jill Furmanovsky

By May Thomson

There is a short fragment of Sappho that simply reads: ‘you burn me.’ With these three words (just two in ancient Greek), she exquisitely conveys the intense, consuming nature of love. They can also be read as one of the earliest uses of burns as markers of queer love – a metaphor Chloe Michelle Howarth reanimates and makes titular in her debut lesbian novel, Sunburn.

Sunburn, true to its name, is a stinging, red-raw account of first love. The novel follows Lucy as she falls in love with the startlingly unapologetic Susannah. But, of course, there is always Martin – Lucy’s doting, handsome-enough friend, who everyone in the claustrophobic Crossmore expects her to marry. Martin is safety, while Susannah is, in the fullest sense of the word, divine happiness.

It is Susannah – loud, passionate, and fiercely loving – who wins the reader’s heart (as well as Lucy’s). The other characters lack the same depth; Martin is a flat character who exists to perform a narrative function and Lucy is a dull mirror, at once uncompromising and reflective, prioritising her reception over her internal reality –  pleasing no one in the process. Susannah, conversely, is depressingly patient, clawing at the idea that Lucy will choose her loudly and leave the ‘sweet wastleland’ of Crossmore behind. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the novel is that, even after choosing Martin, Lucy loses everything she has so desperately clung onto. And none of the pain was worth it.

Like love itself, Howarth’s imagery is starkly contrasting – blending the thematic threads of sunlight and faith with visceral, bodily imagery: ‘I am all wounds, Susannah, and you are the loveliest pus. Flooding in to heal me. Yellow as the sun.’ These lines reflect the unlikely blend of the corporeal and sunny. The text feels, as a result, as grounded as it is lofty – as solar as sickening. A study in cognitive dissonance, Lucy’s wild emotions set the rhythm for the text, sending us volleying back and forth between mad, unapologetic love, and guilty, repentant cowardice. Despite being a girl, Susannah is more than Lucy could ever have imagined and later, when she leaves to travel and take other lovers, she remains unresolvedly present.

There is threefold value in the sunburn metaphor for queer love. First, it represents queer joy; lesbian love is sun-like – dazzling and bright. The sun becomes a figure of vitality and affirmation, casting queerness as something vivid – even life-giving. Second, the sun motif represents truth, picking up common associations with light and honesty. To step into the sun is to step into visibility – but this comes with risk. Exposure can be painful, and the resulting ‘burn’ reflects the often painful and strikingly visible cost of living openly. The metaphor thus captures the ambivalence of truth: it is illuminating but not without harm. 

Sunburn also speaks to the themes of pain and visibility. Unlike a hidden wound, a burn is raw, blistering, and marked on the skin for others to see. It is a public record of one’s exposure, suggesting that queerness (or, at least, the reception of it) leaves traces that are not easily concealed. Thus, sunburn becomes a kind of memory, imprinting on the body beyond the moment of exposure and contact. Likewise, the temporality of sunburn elevates this representation; it’s a delayed reaction, surfacing hours after a day in the sun. 

Queerness, likewise, is latent – often belatedly realised. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us, shame is not only wounding but generative – a mark of exposure that both hurts and makes queer identity legible. Sunburn, in Howarth’s novel, works in exactly this way: a searing trace on the skin, painful yet luminous, a record of love lived under the risk of visibility. This exposure carries a double valence, then, as it is framed as at once vital and wounding.

This metaphor, standing in opposition to metaphors like the closet and the shadow in its focus on visibility, judgement, and joy, clarifies the dynamics between Lucy and Susannah. When Lucy lies in the sun, Susannah lies beside her. Susannah is no Juliet, however, and is not equated with the sun consistently. The sun represents something beyond a lover – an external force that shapes queer life – and it shines on both girls. The metaphor also has implications for heterosexuality. While heterosexuality, for Lucy (or the queer subject more broadly), might be imagined as a life lived in shadow, queerness is figured in searing light. The sun figures as a metaphor for queer love that does not simply encompass judgment and shame, but also the conditions of unapologetic and honest existence. 

For all its sadness, Sunburn cannot be reduced to a lesbian tragedy. By treating sunburn as both wound and illumination, Howarth adds to a wider tradition in queer literature that understands desire as inextricably bound up with exposure. This metaphor does not simply describe the romance between Lucy and Susannah, but reconfigures how we read the visibility of queer love – as something at once joyous, wounding, and indelible.

Feature Image: Pinterest

By Liv Thomas

17/07/2025 

Morning 

I was in the Tate Modern when I saw my first Giacometti statue.  

It was a grey day, blanketed by a sweltering heat, and I was alone in Paddington Station.  

No one around me knew that I’d started the day buzzing with that small, yet bright, excitement that comes from seeing someone you haven’t seen in half a year. 

They didn’t know that I was sitting on a bench in complete humiliation after receiving a response to my “here” text that read “I thought we were meeting tomorrow?”. 

I didn’t want to catch the next train home; I’d paid for this journey, after all. So I walked through, in my head, all the things I would want to do in London if I ever found myself alone there. Art galleries are a great place to explore if you want to blend in among a crowd of people who are perfectly content to be within their own company. I decided on the Tate Modern – and that’s where my day turned from strange to true.  

Midday 

The spatial layout of most art galleries carries the intention of leading you from one piece to another until you finish your journey with a new sense of meaning. The Tate Modern, on the other hand, makes you feel very, very small. 

Upon entering, the concrete walls and glass panels on either side of me stretched above to what I can only vaguely remember as a bright light. Facing the entrance, I turned left; if you were to see a map of the Turbine Hall, this would be in the direction of a tumorous-looking structure leeching onto an otherwise square building. 

This tumour is where I saw my first Giacometti statue.  

You enter this space and you’re presented with several openings, each leading to its own exhibition. You look down the corridor to one and see an alien standing at the end. Except it’s not an alien, it’s L’Homme au doigt. 

Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the statue as “always halfway between nothing and being,” and that’s exactly how I felt when I found myself in this liminal space between the rest of the Tate Modern, and the works of Alberto Giacometti.  

The exhibition was lit in a way that made the square-shaped corridor look like a tunnel, with the dark corners of each four-pointed frame bending over the sculptures, as a light pointed directly at them stretched their shadows against the wall.  

My first association was with Plato’s Cave. On the one hand, this matter of perspective accentuates Giacometti’s study of the human form and its relationship to the environment. On the other hand, these silhouettes and the figures that cast them represent the dual significations between alienation and endurance, fragility and resistance, and our anxieties and hopes.  

Notes on Giacometti 

Giacometti is often regarded as a late modernist who reaffirmed figuration after World War II.  Similar to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — only translated here through plaster, clay, and bronze — Giacometti’s sculptures capture the fading afterimage of a society laid bare by war, fixating on humanity seen through a lens of thin, metal limbs, as if the world itself had been whittled down to its trembling bones. 

Despite their proximity, the figures wander aimlessly, with neither direction nor acknowledgement – their identities blur, yet they are completely disconnected. 

Giacometti rejected the artistic notion of replicating reality; instead he sought to uncover the truth of life by reducing it to its barest principles. His art serves as an alternative to the superficiality of hyper-realism in sculpting.  

This specific figure is inspired by Egyptian artistic traditions. While the name of the piece suggests otherwise, the sculpture conveys no sense of movement and rather reflects a wider awareness of varying 20^th century stylisations.  

Final thoughts 

My thoughts at the Tate Modern gather to the present day.  

Plato’s Cave tells the story of prisoners trapped in a cave, and the shadows cast by a fire are mistaken for reality. Mimesis is an illusion that distracts us from the fragmented nature of human existence, and authenticity is needed now more than ever in a digital age that conglomerates everything fed into it.  

When you cast a shadow against Giacometti’s works, you don’t see reality –  you see a half-starved person, a physical manifestation of psychological confinement, a charred body… or maybe you would even see yourself.

Seeing this for myself in London, surrounded by strangers, and with a lost purpose for the day – left with the lingering feeling of reading whatever was in the news that morning – I couldn’t help but let Giacometti’s shadows speak to me. A lone person faces another human in the form of a sculpture; both carry multitudes. 

Featured Image: Liv Thomas