Artistic exchange in Footnote
A new magazine from Alex Hunting Studio, Footnote is a clever and playful title that invites writers, photographers and artists to respond to a ‘central text’. For this first issue the foundational text is Peg, a short story by AK Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches, and it’s a brilliantly creepy, satisfyingly repellent piece of writing. Peg is a monstrous fish woman – she was normal once, but she fell into the river a long time ago, and has since transformed into a thing of the water, lurking just below the surface, “beneath the underpass by the potholed road between the railway station and the Hollywood Bowl”.
The magazine’s contributors were each invited to respond to a specific line or phrase, and those slivers of text are marked in the story as the footnotes that inspired the words and pictures that follow. For example John Sunyer chose the line, “all the effluvium that sinks beneath the water”, as his excuse to interview Feargal Sharkey, the one-time frontman of The Undertones who now spends his days campaigning for cleaner waterways in Britain. Meanwhile ‘Pemi Aguda uses, “rotting hits” as the starting point for a short story about a singer in Lagos who becomes obsessed with a fur coat, never taking it off although his body rots away underneath it.
The two pieces are completely different in subject matter and tone, but both are clearly related to the central text, each one taking something different from the source material. I loved getting to know this new magazine, sinking into its stories and associations like Peg, “bedded in the silky forklet beneath the waterline”, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where issue two will take it.
