Wedding Ritual #24: Sophie Hanson

Sophie Hanson 

lives and works in Manchester, where, she says, she "also writes fiction and poetry and occasionally paints". I first encountered Sophie's work when she submitted a piece to the legendary* arts anthology zine, Attack!!!! - I think there may have been a connection to our both being Goldsmiths alumni (as well as her degree in Fine Art from Chelsea School of Art, she has a Masters in Film and Screen Studies from that illustrious institution), but the details are lost to the mists of time. In addition to the highlights you'll find detailed below, her work has been featured in Dear Damsels' best-of annual 2019; as editor’s pick in Litro magazine; and she won the Signal House Edition x Write Like a Grrrl poetry competition in 2021. Her spare time is mainly spent learning to pole dance and watching motorsport.

Without further ado, here is Sophie Hanson's Wedding Ritual: 

Something Old

Eclipse Season

While handing over a cup of coffee,
the air folds around your geometry,
intersects
in such a way as to cause the fabric of the universe
to temporarily split,
and the small hurt bisecting the cuticle of your left thumb
becomes a portal
to a parallel universe not dissimilar to this one,
and suddenly I know the shell-shape of your thumbnail impossibly well:
its minute ridges
whisper to me, hymns of convergence.

"This poem is the first piece I had published since my university days, and I’m still very fond of it. I tend to write in fits and starts as a general rule, despite endless attempts to create some sort of consistent daily writing practice, but my poems in particular tend to fall out of me all at once, in a slightly trancelike way. That was very much the case with this piece, which fits with the devotional and quasi-spiritual tone despite the almost non-event of the subject matter itself, being handed a cup. A lot what I write deals with the juxtaposition of the sacred and mundane (or profane!), and although this piece is five years old now, it still feels very representative of me/my work."

Eclipse Season was first published by Dear Damsels

Something New

Alloy - Work in Progress

"This is a work in progress piece, currently titled Alloy, that I wrote late last year and haven’t quite figured out how to fix yet. Like much of my fiction, it could also have worked well as my “blue” selection! I have an enduring fascination with androids, artificial intelligence and how they intersect with human sexuality, and this is the most explicit piece I’ve written on that topic so far. I’m a huge fan of JG Ballard and Crash was an incredibly formative read for me when I was 17 (as was the Cronenberg adaptation, although it doesn’t do the book justice in some respects) and much of my work is a kind of love letter to that book and its ideas: “To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”  I’m also writing a novel — albeit in a very slow and faltering fashion — that explores similar themes, the ways that artificial intelligence, despite its non-corporeality, can nevertheless impact on our fleshly, fragile bodies in dangerous or even deadly ways. "

Something Borrowed

Deleuze and Guattari, ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?’, from A Thousand Plateaus

I really struggled to decide what to choose here, but in the end I came back to my original touchstone, this essay which has steered my work and thoughts for well over a decade now. It’s a dense and quite obtuse read, and I’m sure that even now my understanding of it is quite rudimentary, but it helped me to fashion a coherent worldview which still centres the body as a mutable, changeable site for exploration rather than a static vessel with all the constraints that implies. Its themes have provided a way to link so many of my interests, from horror movies, to science/speculative fiction, to beauty and fashion, to kink and fetish, to religion and witchcraft. The Body without Organs is a site for the continuous cycle of destruction and creation, and the lack of a fixed self it describes has allowed me to live and create with a freedom I wouldn’t allow myself otherwise. I suppose it’s quite a nihilistic text in many respects, and there’s certainly been plenty of critique of Deleuze and Guatarri’s philosophical approach in general, but the BwO, with all of its masochistic urges, its dissociative tendencies and inconsistencies, still feels like a home of sorts. “The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy.”

Something Blue

"As I mentioned, most of what I create probably fits into the “blue” category pretty comfortably, but this is one of my favourites. It’s another older piece, painted during my art school days, and it’s taken from a screenshot from Rob Zombie film The Devil’s Rejects. Horror movies were an early (and fairly problematic!) introduction to the kind of psychosexual power dynamics that still fascinate me and inform a lot of my work to this day — I actually wrote an essay to go alongside this painting looking at the erotic potential of the horror film from a feminist perspective. Reading it back now, my understanding both of myself and the sociopolitical topics surrounding sex and violence has improved and deepened a lot, but my attraction to these slightly morally repellant horror films continues. I’m a big fan of painting from screen caps, too — again, it goes back to my love of capturing a tiny moment, In this case selecting a frame that makes up 1/24th of a second in a film, and then imbuing it with the kind of devotional time and energy required for a large-scale oil painting. It transmutes something fleeting and potentially inconsequential into an image which is heavy and freighted with unspoken meaning, all the more so with an image like this which is unambiguous in its violent connotations and yet removed from the context of the film scene it once sat within."

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You can and should follow Sophie Hanson on Instagram, and look out for her under her adopted moniker 'radiofireworks' elsewhere.

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The next Ritual will be conducted in due course by an as-yet unannounced creative. Watch this space. If you'd like it to be you, get in touch: theweddingritual@gmail.com

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*legendary in my mind, as I was its editor. Or, indeed, am its editor, albeit that it's on indefinite hiatus at the time of writing.