Image courtesy of the artists

Sally O’Reilly & James M’Kay

Sally O’Reilly writes for performance, page and video. Her diverse subject matter spans such abstractions as rhetoric and ambiguity, as well more concrete phenomena – for example, noses and 1970s policing. Her ongoing research and practice is a means to conduct an investigation into how knowledge is generated, circulated, expressed and overlooked.

Besides contributing to several art magazines and numerous exhibition catalogues, she has written the libretto for the opera The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, Opera North, 2015), a monograph on Mark Wallinger (Tate Publishing, 2015) and The Body in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2009).

She was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11) and at Modern Art Oxford (2016); producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine, a radio sitcom set in the art world (ICA, London, 2011), and co-editor of Implicasphere (2003–8), an interdisciplinary broadsheet.

James M’Kay started writing and performing poems, as well as devising and running events to perform them at, in the year 2000. Shortly afterwards, he abandoned plans for a career as a professional Latin scholar and has been poeting and agitating ever since. Having helped launched a number of spoken word careers through organisations such as Home Cooking in Newcastle and Utter! Spoken Word in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe, he now lives at Gravesend in Kent, where he is the host of monthly neighbourhood poetry night ReVerb Chamber. His second collection of poems, Very Friendly Weapon, was published by Burning Eye Books in 2018. He also appears on the poetry-and-prog-rock album Follow On by The Morris Quinlan Experience, which gained national and international airplay and led to a live performance at London’s much-missed 12Bar.