Helen Charman

Counterflows on Paper 2026. Now available to read online! ✨ (link in bio) Counterflows On Paper 2026 features new writing by Lola Olufemi, Nisha Ramayya, dundee radio club, Masa Nazzal, Lewis Cook (GLOSS) and Eoin Anderson, alongside a special Beijing-Scotland underground music ‘Shortwave Q&A’, Fielding Hope interviewing Ryu Hankil, poetry from Music Space resident Gem Kinley, and a series of artworks by artists from Project Ability. This edition has been edited by our friends Helen Charman & Joel White, and designed by Oliver Pitt Printed by @good_press Made possible by support from @creativescots @helchar // @pitt.oliver // @headslice , @dundeeradio.club // @gloss_cic // @music_space_glasgow // @yanjunbeijing // @gem.kinley // @big_daftie // @projectability

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I turned 33! I’m out of the swamp and into the symmetrical! ♾️♉️🌱 (birthday Fanny Howe from @daisylafarge / dead ewes doodled by Denise Riley for Tom Raworth then sent to me years later by Luke and framed, years after that, by Eilidh)

COUNTERFLOWS ON PAPER — fifth edition! — with some incredible pieces of writing and once again illustrated brilliantly by Project Ability artists 🪩 And our first ever launch event! With performances from Nisha Ramayya, Sarah Lasoye, Masa Nazzal, Ali Robertson & the highly mysterious DJ Lanyard. The video is a snippet of Sarah reading Lola’s poem quoting Nisha, which pretty much sums up the glorious entanglement I think 🕸️🧶♾️ I love editing this magazine and I love working with Joel ‘no instagram’ White and everyone else who makes it happen every year wow. Bonus photo at the end of the tracksuit I wore pretty much every day between the ages of 7 and 10 that makes a cameo in this year’s introduction 📡

half of March living in the attic of an art museum // thank u Palazzo Butera for the writing residency, Trenitalia for access to the hiking spots and Cefalu beach for the extremely gruesome stomach bug 🦠 🤹🏻‍♀️

Making an exhibition, an ambitious one, is a roller coaster kind of process, to say the least. This is a corny comparison but, true, and it can be more pronounced the less empowered you are, or have been, in life. At some point the ride ends and you might feel dizzy, ill, sad, happy, disorientated - hopefully in a helpful way. The ground can shift and you might think… did I just do that? A rare occasion but sometimes the ride breaks, breaks you, and you do not survive. Well, I’m not broken this time, but Assembly was all that and more for me, and I’m still working through what happened during and through the exhibition. How lucky then, to have Helen Charman’s @helchar insightful and brilliant thinking, observing words to share now, months after the ride closed. You can read her blog about the exhibition on the Hunterian @hunterianglasgow website, link in bio. With deep-felt thanks to Dominic Paterson for commissioning and Helen for spending time with my work. Helen’s text reminded me of so many reasons why I made the exhibition; it reminded me of all that surrounds me and supports me, but also what holds, or has attempted to hold, me back. How brilliant to have the opportunity to release all those forces into the work and out of my head; child benefit appeals, interior notes on a studio wall, outgrown children’s clothes, beautiful things, dead things... And theory and life and ‘bringing life to theory’; in such good company. And then a film, which is coming :) Some stills of the show, with thanks to all who visited ❤️.

The second in our series of articles reflecting on what an online space for writing about art in Glasgow could look like today, is OUT NOW on the Journal and on Substack! 😎 The series continues with Helen Charman @helchar on Maria Fusco’s ‘Contemporary Art Writing and its Environs’ published on @map_magazine in 2008, in which she reflects on art writing as a political form and the current systematic closure of arts and cultural spaces in Glasgow. “This kind of enforced decline is political, and targeted. It denies the people of the city access to what belongs to them, and it further enshrines artistic and literary production as the pastimes of the wealthy and the privileged.” 😎😎😎😎😎 Helen Charman is a writer who lives in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State: a political history of motherhood came out with Penguin/Allen Lane in 2024. MAP was a non-for-profit digital platform dedicated to the discussion and support of artist-led publishing and production. Launched in 2005, after 25 issues in print, MAP was recast in 2011 as an online project with occasional print and production projects attached, led by editorial directors, Alice Bain (founding editor) and Laura Haynes. Image: ‘A “Social Situation” as Depicted by a Young Child’, in Psychological Atlas with 400 Illustrations, David Katz (1968) @map_magazine @helchar

It was truly a joy to be invited to write about @margaretsalmon ’s beautiful ASSEMBLY @hunterianglasgow , not least because of the prominence of language, of scribbled notes to self and well-thumbed reading material, in the exhibition itself 🕸️🌱 you can read the text on the Hunterian’s website / I’ve put the link in my bio 🍀🩸🧹

happy birthday @eyelidrodgers 🥁🌊♑️🌞🐈‍⬛ Capricorn with a Bart Simpson rising 💙💙💙💙💙💙

2025 felt like this (disenchantment then reenchantment with writing, disenchantment then reenchantment with reading, QUITTING and that being the cause of the reenchantments, remaining angry. But also and most importantly: JOY and feeling ALIVE💥☄️✨🌙) (Daisy Lafarge, Marianne Morris, Eileen Myles, talisman from Glasgow Women’s Library via Sophie Collins, Holly Pester, Alice Notley, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, Willow Rosenberg)

Happy to announce that our seminar series Lives in Common has been awarded funding by the RCA SoA Annual Research Programme. Lives in Common is a school-wide lecture series that investigates the changing forms of shared dwelling in the UK. While the family home is traditionally understood as a monolith, both in its social and spatial structure, this research project explores domesticity as an expanded system of kinship applicable to many other forms of communal living. In addition to the nuclear family, this ranges from intergenerational households, co-parenting and shared custody homes, to platonic cohabitation, communal child-rearing, and intentional communities. In exploring these configurations, this research project aims to challenge dominant narratives of domesticity and raise urgent questions about how architecture can support diverse ways of living. Speakers include Ed Jones, Adam Khan, Rachael Bagenal and Helen Charman, the latter who be joining us this coming Thursday 18 November to share insights from the “Collective Experiments” chapter of her recently published book Mother State, with a focus on feminist squats in London in the 1970s.

I wrote about After The Hunt – and sexual violence on campus, psychoanalysis and Sorry, Baby – for @anothergazejournal 🦌 🏹 (the link is in my bio) 〰️