Heidi Sopinka’s second novel lifts from the lives of feminist artists like Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke and Judy Chicago. Here, she talks about the constraints of gender and the body, and the utopianism of second-wave feminism and performance art ⬇️
, Paz learns to celebrate making work outside of the system – work that cannot be commodified and that rejects the capitalist, patriarchal organisation of the art world. For Sopinka, a writer and designer who also wrote about women and art in her debut book, these artists used their bodies “as a tool or a material, and so having nothing for sale made it by nature anti-capitalist and feminist as a result.
TG: Speaking of embodiment, Romy often expresses her ambivalence about gender, and later on, there is an implication of gender nonconformity. Can you talk about writing her fascinating relationship to the body?The epigraph of the book is “the body is not a thing, it’s a situation,” which is Simone de Beauvoir.
HS: All of those themes are so close to me! When I was writing this book, I went through early menopause in my early forties and at the same time, my eldest child is a transgender person. And so It was a huge part of my thinking and I tapped into it, also around body works and, as you mentioned, ghosts. I guess I don’t believe that on one side there are ghosts and on the other side there’s the undead, sort of like the dark matter in the book that gets brought up by the Romy character – everything exists everywhere all at once.
HS: I weirdly got my pilot’s license after I finished university. I worked as a bush cook on forest fires in the Yukon-Alaska border, and we got flown in in helicopters, and I remember I just had this feeling like going off a cliff – just like, “This is an incredible feeling.” And I started to talk to the pilots and understood that they did sort of six weeks or eight weeks of really intense, dangerous work and then that was their pay for the whole year.
spending time with a baby, the patriarchy says, is not the stuff of art. But I like the notion of thinking, “Well, maybe it is.”
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