Sophie Paul

  1. Read All About It: Feminist & Queer Newsletters at the Feminist Library
  2. Permanently Deferred: A Bibliographic Opera
  3. The Crystal Monologues
  4. Nuclear Knock Off 
  5. People Like Us
  6. Five Years of Sticky Fingers Publishing
  7. Essay: We Make Space With Our Own Words
  8. “I had a vision of political utopia...”
  9. The Most Realest Thing There Is 
  10. Essay: No Place for Our Quick Stuff
  11. Access Consultancy for RCA2022  
  12. Sticky Fingers Publishing

Sophie Paul is a designer and writer based in London. Her research is concerned with self-organised feminist print practices and support structures. She makes work about iridescence, girls, and the instability of language.

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The Crystal Monologues I


The Crystal Monologues is a a long-term research and performance project, which explores a re-conceptualisation of girlhood through iridescence. It asks: how might language metamorphosize when shaped by the tendencies of the iridescent: deceptive, scattered, shimmering? What power and pleasure is there in a disguise? How do we keep moving?  

Iridescence is understood as a shimmering, volatile act of light which troubles our conceptions of surface. Iridescence is inseparable from an image of contemporary girlhood: it is found in the tacky and sparkly, the plastic-y, the oils and slimes of the screens we access this through. By revisiting an understanding of the iridescent – this deceptive act of light – we may come to a re-definition for contemporary girlhood that gives her more agency, perhaps to escape categorisation altogether. 

Through visual monologue style texts and performance, inspired by Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 sci-fi The Blazing New World, the works traverses the Arctic Sea, awash with the waxy undead bodies of sailors, jewels, and ice palaces.

An edition of this was performed at TACO! as part of BLURT: an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast on rtm.fm.
 
See more here.