HEAT 14

'[W]orking in art has that same quality of unclarity for artists that a discipline label has for scholars, writes Simryn Gill in the opening pages of our new issue, it can be hard to pick when or where something begins and ends, what definitions or containers, of medium or intention, to put things in.' Gill's essay, 'Repeating Chasms', examines the magnetic pull of the materials we use to create our external thinking tools and what is lost when the chemical ways of processing and printing film are no longer available to us.

Making and materiality also inform 'Ideas for a Book', a sequence by Ana Martins Marques (translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Alison Entrekin), reminding us of the elemental qualities of the object we hold in our hands.

In prose, Dominic Smith explores the nature of lost art through the lens of one particular stolen painting, Vermeer's The Concert, which, removed from its frame...begins a new life, not so much a comet flashing onto the night sky of history as a cave-lit match in the underworld. Lauren Aimee Curtis tells a story within a story in her 'Diary of a Pilgrim' that looks at the Portuguese town of Ftima, where in 1917 three shepherd children claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

Two poets each contribute three poems. Juan Carlos Mestre (translated from the Spanish by Peter Boyle) provides 'Instructions for Calling Eternity's Cell Phone', beginning: Press star. Wait to listen in the void to the roses' gospel... And Norman Erikson Pasaribu imagines encounters with the divine, his mother and the Dutch boy in his DMs.