Artist Olivia Bax’s workshop used creative writing tasks to connect Speculative Realism – the rejection of anthropocentrism in relation to objects – to our individual practices.

We began by arranging personal objects in the liminal ‘wings’ of an arbitrarily designated ‘stage’ space in our studio and progressed with writing tasks that asked us to draw out qualities of the objects that were completely divorced from their known functions: thinking ‘through’ and not ‘about’ them. Finally, we wrote speculative biographies of a chosen object - recontextualising it by writing a story in which it is sentient and performs a simple action, eventually bringing one of our own artworks into the same fictional world and considering it through the same lens.

These tasks provided an effective introduction to Speculative Realism by using creative writing’s intrinsic suspension of disbelief to approach a seemingly highly abstract way of thinking. Fiction provided a space for us to subvert the usual hierarchy of human subject over object by protagonising without necessarily anthropomorphising. The eventual analysis of our own artworks laid out the relevance of this concept for artists – to consider objects’ potential agency and non-human ‘experience’ of being. Could thinking and making within this philosophical framework change our practice and our relationship with our art?

Bax ended the session by reading a piece of creative writing that had taken the place of a traditional press release for her exhibition, written from the perspective of her studio’s dolly who observed Bax’s process of making and relationship with her materials. This was a fitting demonstration of the expanded creative possibilities engendered by engaging with Speculative Realism as an artist. This felt particularly relevant for my practice which is very much focused on materiality and the creation of objects.