This month’s Currents were selected by Juliet Scott, soon after her Still Life intervention at the 80th Leicester Conference, in August 2026.
Juliet is Business Development manager, Principal Consultant and lead of our Arts and Organisations work, which is integral to our approach at the Tavistock Institute.
This is a podcast conversation between Laura Beatty and Edmund de Waal, about Laura’s short story Pear Trees.
Pear Trees is a beautiful thing. Set in Albania, it’s a story about a woman living in a remote mountain valley who has a health scare.
What I like about the podcast conversation, between a writer and a potter/writer, is the passage about our vessel-like bodies, that we are all made of water, and the rest of what makes us is clay, pulling us back into our environment, our surroundings.
The proposition that I am actually a clay pot is an existential and identity-related thing, that I find very grounding.
Podcast conversation between Laura Beatty and Edmund de Waal in London Review Bookshop.
Credit: Cover of Pear Trees by Laura Beatty (Hazel Press). Image courtesy of Hazel Press.
Everyday conversations become absurd, are turned upside down and inside out, in this book by US psychoanalyst and writer Christopher Bollas.
Bollas has this extraordinary sensibility to translate psychoanalytic ideas into simple, poetic and aesthetic language.
He takes the reader into that confusing and disturbing space of what is me and what is not me, everything that might be in between, and holds us there. He makes vessels in the way he writes.
Order this book from Karnac bookshop
Credit: Extract from cover of Conversations by Christopher Bollas (Phoenix Publishing House, 2023). Image courtesy of the publisher
“For the artist, the studio was the field where life and work came together.
Everything developed here: sensation, perception, meditation, and creation, daytime life and night-time life, dream, dialogue, and metamorphosis.” (pp168-169)
Marilena Pasquali is a woman writing about the Italian still life and landscape artist, Morandi. He lived a quiet life, not straying far from his home in Bologna, mainly painting and drawing still life compositions.
Through a series of essays, Pasquali argues that there is complexity in these simple looking pieces. Much like Beatty’s vessels, they contain everything within them.
I was excited to discover this book on a recent trip to Bologna when I returned to the Morandi museum.
Credit: Photo: Paolo Monti, 1981. Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC, Civico Archivio Fotografico di Milano. CC BY-SA 4.0
Spend 14 minutes and 2 seconds immersing yourself in a digital, sensory experience.
This video from 2024 is a soundscape of an Ambient Jam* session, with Hannah James’ paintings as the imagery.
In choosing and selecting it, I found myself immediately faced with the question of attention.
Would readers would stay with something in such a different register, learn, be led and yield into a non-verbal space?
Hannah’s paintings express what she is feeling in her body as she dances.
View the video with Hannah’s paintings
Image: Painting by Hannah James, from Ambient Jam Soundscapes 2024
*Ambient Jam is a unique dance improvisation programme arising from long term collaborations with adults and young people who have profound and multiple disabilities.