The Death issue brings together voices exploring grief, transformation and what remains. Victoria Sharples and Claye Bowler share a long-form conversation on curating death. Conor Walker writes meditatively on experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Icelandic-Lithuanian performance artist Kamilė Pikelytė speaks with Wishart about rituals, remainders and reformation. An extract from the work of Dr John Troyer, aka Dr Death, reflects on the human corpse in culture and science. Wishart revisits a 'dead chapter' from her PhD, tracing how artists Rachel Whiteread, Do Ho Suh and Gordon Matta-Clark render domestic space as vessel, ghost, and monument. The edition also features returning contributions from Alistair Gentry, Tash Kahn and Cathy Rose.

Cover: detail @victoriaemilysharples (photo: James Clarkson)

The Death issue will launch at Aye-Aye books at Broadside, 123 Allison St., Glasgow, G42 8NE

6-8pm on Saturday 1st November

There'll be a film screening introduced by Conor Walker, some extracts from the edition read by Sarah Wishart, alongside local writers performing work on death including Kate Taylor, Sara O'Brien and Lucie McLaughlin with others TBC

Contributors
Jack Brown
Claye Bowler
Alistair Gentry
Heavy Digestations
Tash Kahn
Laurie Oxenford
Kamile Pikelyte
Cathy Rose
Victoria Sharples
Dr John Troyer
Conor Walker
Dr Sarah Wishart - Editor

Design & art direction: chk design
Director: Karl England
Publisher: Sluice
Sluice editor: Tash Kahn

Launch
@ayeayebooks
Broadside
Lucie McLaughlin
Kate Taylor
Sara O’Brien

GUEST EDITING - SLUICE MAGAZINE

Its been six years since I was the first guest-editor on Sluice Magazine and this time we wanted to journey through my residency on the Isle of Coll focussing on death, grief and healing - through the Sluice Film Festival where I hoped to show the work I’d been making on Coll and enable me to talk to artists there about the theme for the magazine. I was being wildly optimistic about the time it’d take me to turn anything created in an R&D environment into something polished enough to screen at a film festival - but I was still able instead to take a film of Tim Knights - a filmmaker and dear friend who died suddenly in 2024.

Open call text
The previous edition of Sluice magazine looked at world-building, and as with all things under the sun which sucumb to entropy and ruin this is reflected in artist-led activity. 

For the next edition of Sluice, we’re inviting artists, writers and thinkers to engage with the theme of death in all its complexity: personal, political, cultural, environmental, symbolic. These ideas could include (but not be limited to) some of the following:

Death as metaphor
Death as spectacle

Death as injustice
Death as ritual, rupture, memory, material
Death as part of life
Endings that are also beginnings

Contributions can be new or existing. Experimental, intimate, collective, abstract or direct.

Sluice magazine is primarily concerned with artist and curator-led culture. The magazine takes this as a starting point to explore a subject from as many angles as possible, from cultural production from around the world.

Send brief outline of ideas or projects or angles you think may be of interest to the email below.

The current issue of Sluice maazine is out now. Buy or subscribe by clicking the image below