Innominate

“Everything becomes familiar eventually. But there was something else, I’d tried to explain, a rhythmic presence like breath, barely a sound, more like pressure. I feel it on my stomach in bed, a weight. The hairs on my neck stand on end. She still doesn’t believe me…”

Tower Street, East London, 1975: a crumbling block of artists’ studios shaped by the myth of male genius but maintained by Connie, a female caretaker struggling to find her creative voice. Cut to 2017, and this same building is now luxury apartments, the new home of young couple Jane and Tam. Yet their fresh start is jeopardized when a chance discovery brings past secrets to light.

Drawing on interviews with artists, photographers and administrators, as well as autobiographical elements, Innominate is a mystery story about privilege and power, in which buildings (and bodies) alternately nurture, trap, and entangle their inhabitants. Perhaps it is only by dissecting the architecture of a place that we can truly understand what happened there?

Author Biography

Naomi Pearce is a writer and curator. Recent exhibitions include Almost Conceptual, Matt’s Gallery and 56 Artillery Lane, Raven Row, London (co-curated with Amy Budd). Her writing has been published by Art Monthly, Happy Hypocrite, Kunstverein Munich, Punctum Books and The White Review, among others. From 2018-2022 she was a member of the Rita Keegan Archive Project, a social history and curatorial collective, whose recent activity includes an exhibition at South London Gallery and the publication Mirror Reflecting Darkly with MIT Press. Innominate is her first novel.