Nina Hanz
MA Writing Student at the Royal College of Art
I have written a lot about the human body; its movements and illness; the paradoxes of stillness; and the rapid acceleration of time (and people) passing. But for me, these subjects were always incomplete without a context, the spaces within which we find them, and places which ground them. To gain a deeper understanding, I began to look downwards— under.
I began by looking at the land,
what it has gone through and how its slow movements and tectonic shifts seemed, initially, to teach us recovering.
And by looking down, I found all these little things: the gunk that gets stuck under our fingernails, the grit that gets trapped in a clamshell, the tiny particles that make up the enamel of our teeth. Wherever in time or space I found them, they seemed fleeting. My writing was meant as their landing, as their return, as a hardening in time on paper.
