Talk Art

New Talk Art podcast! Robert meets Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL, a British Jamaican poet, educator, and writer born in Hackney, London, to an English mother and Jamaican father. Diagnosed as deaf at age six, his work explores themes of sound, language, identity, and memory.

His writing reflects a lived experience shaped by both mainstream and deaf schooling, and a profound engagement with questions of communication and belonging.

Raymond Antrobus was diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds - bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn't believe he was deaf at all.

The Quiet Ear tells his story - from childhood to fatherhood - and the stories of other D/deaf cultural figures, from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers - the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity Antrobus did not have growing up.

Told with the electrifying prose of a poet, this groundbreaking and moving memoir explores family, identity, history and language, and what it means to be in a world saturated with noise.

Widely celebrated, his poetry has earned the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In 2019, he became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. His poems have been added to the GCSE syllabus in the UK, and his children’s book Can Bears Ski? was the first book to be read using BSL on the BBC, by Rose Ayling-Ellis.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021.

The Quiet Ear, his first work of prose, is a groundbreaking memoir and cultural history of deafness. Raymond currently lives and works between New Orleans, US and Margate, UK.

Follow @Raymond_Antrobus
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It’s Season 28!!! New Talk Art podcast hosted by Robert Diament.

Robert meets painter John Currin, recorded at his solo show Opening Credits at Sadie Coles.

Currin is widely recognised for his figurative oil paintings in which themes of sexual personae and historical painterly genres appear in surreal and at times, disconcerting guises. Oscillating between a graphic sexuality and playful symbolism, Currin captures the tones and textures of everyday life with an acute sensitivity and a meticulous attention to detail.

John Currin’s show at Sadie Coles’ Savile Row gallery focuses on a new series of paintings that set pairs or triplets of women with exaggerated physiques in ornamental, Arcadian landscapes. In the sequence of twelve mid-size paintings, performative models, reinterpreted from the pages of 1970s clothing catalogues, are poised in a confident display that provides Currin with the means to explore classical painting. In his rendering of the tension of fabric stretched tight across breasts, the light on feathered leaves and gnarled trunks, the radiant softness of flesh and hair, and the self-conscious assembly of limbs, these tableaus allow Currin to make masterful paintings that replace a disappointing contemporary world, with a ‘lost golden world’ that holds his nostalgia for the past. A group of five new drawings in ink on washed paper interpret the paintings in a new medium and sketches from his process are shown alongside the finished works.

Currin was the opening exhibition of the gallery in 1997, and in the nearly thirty years since, his combination of academic virtuosity and contemporary fetish has unapologetically progressed his painterly agenda. His male and female figures are an endlessly exciting architecture for paint; these new works show bodies that are various and imperfect, that perhaps suggest the ageing process and remind us that Currin has always made works that are in some way autobiographical. There is surprise in the dimensions of these bodies, an affectionate gag on the changing physiognomy of age, when shapes slip from the ideal to the fantastic.

However, these imagined inhabitants of Arcadia present the easy confidence of maturity, of serenity and luxury, and capture the mutual misunderstanding of a child’s view of adults and an adult’s view of childhood. Pairing an imaginary landscape familiar in Poussin or in Watteau’s romanticised and fantastical Journey to the Isle of Cythera, 1717, with the reality of Acadia National Park in Maine, Currin gives us an ornamental landscape bearing the animated actors, hilltops, weather and clouds of both the idealised past and the current self.

John Currin Opening Credits runs until 12th September 2026 at Sadie Coles, 17 Savile Row W1S.

Follow @SadieColesHQ and @TalkArt for
imsges of all artworks discussed in this episode.
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New @TalkArt podcast episode! Season 27 finale!

Robert meets Matthew Slotover OBE, legendary publisher and entrepreneur. This episode was recorded live from Maison Estelle in London.

Matthew Slotover co-founded the art magazine Frieze in 1991 and grew into a major media and events company that has a focus on the art scene and since 2003 produces the annual Frieze Art Fair in London, later joined by fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul.

In 2021 he opened Toklas, a Mediterranean restaurant in London, and in 2022, he launched Fort Road Hotel in Margate.

Matthew is currently chair of Turner Contemporary, Margate, and a board member of Sadlers Wells and the Walpole Group.

He is a founding member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, and a founding board member of Murmur, an environmental charity dedicated to using the Arts to combat climate change. Matthew served as a trustee of the Arts Foundation until 2024.

Follow @MSlotover

Thanks for listening to Season 27. I will return soon for a whole new series!!!!
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Robert meets Luis Felber, a London based South-American multi-instrumentalist best known as Attawalpa. His meticulous production, melodies and honest lyrics evoke the future as much as the past.

We explore his love of art and growing up with an artist mother Alma Laura de Felber, a prominent Peruvian painter and artist. The Lima-born painter makes colorful, emotionally resonant oil paintings often explore themes of identity, the feminine, and human connection.

Born in Winchester, England, Felber spent his earliest years in Peru and Chile before moving back to Britain at age 7. At 17, he skipped university and began pursuing a career in music, playing guitar with several different bands and co-founding influential club night and record label Young Turks.

Felber actively incorporates his creative roots into his projects. His mother's art has been featured in his work, and he frequently collaborates with his wife, Lena Dunham including on the soundtrack for her film Catherine Called Birdy and by co-creating and scoring the Netflix comedy series Too Much.

Recording and performing under the name Attawalpa (his middle name, after the 16th-century Incan ruler Atahualpa), his albums Experience and Presence are both available now on vinyl and at all streaming platforms.

Follow: @Attawalpa

Visit: https://attawalpa.com/
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Robert meets Belfast-born Kathryn Ferguson, an Emmy and BAFTA nominated, BIFA and IFTA winning director whose innovative and boundary-pushing documentary work has screened globally. We explore art as activism and how film has the power to reveal, and amplify, untold stories. Kathryn studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, and in 2022 was awarded the inaugural BFI & Chanel Award for Creative Audacity.

In 2018, Kathryn's short documentary Taking the Waters about Margate’s open water swimming premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest, and was long-listed for a BAFTA. Then, in 2021, Kathryn worked with Passion Pictures on the short Space to Be for The Guardian's acclaimed documentary series.

After a decade of short-form work centred on identity, gender politics, and community, Kathryn recently completed her debut feature documentary Nothing Compares - which takes as its subject Sinéad O'Connor's artistry and activism. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 then toured the international festival circuit, where it picked up multiple awards, before hitting cinemas in October 2022. It has received over thirty award nominations internationally, including Emmy, Critics Choice, IDA, and PGA Awards, and was awarded winner of Best Feature Documentary at BIFA 2022 and IFTA 2023. Nothing Compares is now available to watch on Showtime and Sky.

Her second feature, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (Universal), was released in US cinemas in 2024.

In 2024 she also co-founded Tara Films with producer Eleanor Emptage; their latest, Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story, premiered at TIFF 2024, and the company is currently developing a slate of non-fiction and drama projects. Alongside her film work, Ferguson has directed campaigns for Nike, Selfridges, Amnesty International, and Air France, and collaborated with artists such as Lady Gaga and Neneh Cherry.

Nostalgie, Kathryn's first drama short starring Aiden Gillen, about a faded 80's pop star, has recently been nominated for a BAFTA and won Best Short Film at the IFTAs 2026. The film is available to watch on Channel 4.
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