Fragment / Figments is a collaboration in progress between visual artist Marc Hulson and novelist Paul Curran. Hulson and Curran are working around common themes in their writing and visual art relating to ideas of corporeal disenchantment, ontological instability and uncertainty.
Paul Curran's novel 'Left Hand' draws on recent theory around 'Body Identity Integrity Disorder'. His disorienting fiction structurally mirrors this psychological condition, constructing a disintegrated narrative subject that is both determined by and profoundly dislocated from the disturbing, intensely physical directives that form the body of the text. images
Like sideshow attractions in a post-human funhouse, the characters in Marc Hulson's paintings and drawings occupy a realist pictorial domain that seems to have subliminally lost its moorings in the actual word it refers to. Ambiguous in gender, masked and subject to physical distortions and deformations, his figures are the listless inhabitants of a collective psyche compartmentalised by irresolvable ontological paradox and crisis.
Through conversations, drawings, writings, objects, photos, sound and performance Hulson and Curran will investigate ways to collaborate and explore their mutual interest in alternate ontologies, the problems of narrative and the relationship between image and text. The outcome of their collaboration will be a work of experimental fiction, in the form of a mixed media installation built around fragments of their individual practices.