Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

ighton festival
..........................................
Ali Smith
The world seen through art-tinted glasses
“Art makes us better, happier human beings,”
says Ali Smith, a smile crossing her face, a glint
in her eye.
I’m sitting under the artificial lighting of the
Brighton Dome Studios, after the press launch
of this year’s Brighton Festival, with a pen
in my hand, struggling to keep up with the
rapid-talking Scottish author. She’s the Guest
Director of this year’s Festival, and she’s been
very hands on. Words are pouring out of her.
Nobody writes this fast.
“Art is exciting, it catches you out and it can
change your life. It gives you space from whatever
is happening around you and allows you to
see where you are going, and where you could
be, and where you have been. And that is just
the starting point.”
Then, without pause: “When we start an art
discussion, it allows us to let things happen
which are bigger than ourselves. All the books
we ever read and all the places we ever visited
enter and pass through us when we come in
contact with other works.”
The author of six novels, four collections of
short stories, as well as two audacious works
of non-fiction, and plays, Ali Smith has proved
that the only predictable element about her
work is the certainty of reinvention. In 2007,
she partnered with the Scottish band Trashcan
Sinatras and wrote the lyrics to Half An Apple,
a love song about keeping half an apple spare
for a lost loved one. In 2013 she became patron
for Visual Verse, an online anthology of art and
words that challenges writers to produce a
short piece in response to an image within an
hour – “an intense, good way to get primeval
feelings out on paper.” Last year, two versions
of her dual-narrative novel How To Be Both
were published simultaneously, winning her the
Goldsmith Prize for original fiction.
Smith’s belief in the power of merging artistic
expressions is evident throughout the festival’s
programme; the event crosses between art
forms, invites us to take another look and
rediscover our surroundings, including nature.
“Cambridge, where I live, is very close to the
countryside, so within five minutes I can be
out of the traffic. That is very important to me
and it should be to everyone. It’s important to
recognise the constraints that are on us, and
the openness of what life really is. We all live
close to pavements, buildings, and other people,
and it’s imperative to negotiate a little bit of a
breather for ourselves. Nature gives us that.”
Looking at her informal khaki jacket and her
wide-legged jeans, it’s easy to imagine Smith
in her wellies, happily trudging through mud.
“I love all the landscapes,” she says. “I think
it comes from being Scottish and living in a
place where the landscape changes very fast.
You can travel half an hour and you are in lush
green Scotland; travel half an hour past that
and you are in a place where there are no trees
and nothing but stags and moss and heather,
and you can travel again until you are on a
cliff edge. We live on a versatile island. And it’s
....54....