2016-9
Non fiction novella and web series
After a moment of possible eye contact at a gig, my attraction to the band’s drummer - Curt - snowballed into limerent obsession. The unsent letters documenting my crush form the basis of overlove: a non-fiction novella concerned with love, boundaries, leaky jars and the female gaze in today’s context of digital communication, millennial malaise and searching online for something ‘more’.
READ AN EXTRACT at THE QUIETUS
READ AN EXTRACT at BERFROIS
INTERVIEW with Daisy Lafarge at ORLANDO ZINE
ESSAY/REVIEW (some spoilers) at NEW FLAG MEDIA
ESSAY/REVIEW (some spoilers) at SPAM ZINE
LISTEN TO INTERVIEW at ROMANCE UTOPIA
overlove launched alongside Sian Robinson Davies “Naked and Practical” @ Pages of Hackney, London and 34 Boar Lane, Leeds
The Web Series - stream via Members
overlove was titled so out of a sense of having too much love and not knowing where to put it. An exercise in self-mining and an exploration of performance and documentation, I pushed the crush I developed on a drummer, pseudonymised as ‘Curt’, to absurd heights through first writing a book of love letters before adapting these into a web series. Each episode used the scaffolding of the original text as a script or stimulus for videos, which were made and posted online 2 years exactly after the original letters were written.
Combining sporadically captured phone and camcorder footage with more considered, composed shots and fourth-wall breaking direct addresses, overlove is both melodramatic and mundane. I was committed, in its production methods and accessible YouTube dissemination, to a DIY, handheld (or embodied), lo-fi aesthetic; a zero budget, singularly produced labour of love. I thought I sought a Magical Other, focusing on ‘Curt’ as objet d’amour, but in documenting and exhibiting overlove, the viewer became the Other I sought.
Watch the first episode here, and sign up to the free members page for exclusive streaming of the full series.
