This is a show that looks for trouble…

Nasty Objects is a desire-filled ‘exhibition guide’, an invitation to wander through gallery spaces where both real and imagined artistic engagements with eroticism across sculpture, painting, drawing and more are carefully displayed.  Ekphrastic, bare, these poems obsessively catalogue cravings, flirtations and fantasies, exposing the thin line between pleasure and pain. Here, provocative objects, images and bodies are explored as entangled sites of disruptive desire, seduction, transgression and vulnerability.

Nasty Objects is a delicious exploration of art and intimacy in a collection of poems that defy form while wielding a complex and shifting narrative landscape. The journey through these poems is complicated, messy and sexual, capturing authentic human connection in various forms, and to various ends. Here, Biggs marks herself as an expert in those unspoken moments that take place between lovers; captured, framed and exhibited in ways we mightn’t even realise at the time of their happening, and what results is a fascinating set of poems that I desperately hope will be the bedrock of a much longer collection from this talented writer. –  Charley Barnes

I sometimes struggle with the rigidity of labelling poetry as ‘ekphrastic’. The naming creates distance between the speaker and the art it speaks of. To describe Julia Biggs’s collection as such diminishes the power of these beautiful moments of (art) intimacy. I did not read the poems in Nasty Objects; I breathed them in, watched them, stood in front of them. I took photographs with my eyes. (I felt desire and need.) Using art terminology and wall text, Julia Biggs’s Nasty Objects becomes a concentrated space of finding, of seeing, of absorbing the self into the art. – Wendy Allen

34pp