VIOLENCE

Helena Kvarnström is one of my favourite artists. I have three of her prints in my house. It's only money that keeps me from buying them all.

I got her book Violence in the mail today. I first read it in 2002 when she published it in zine form. The new version is mostly the same, but with streamed down prose and gussied up presentation (Tiphanie Brooke's cover design is beautiful).

Violence is a delicious, disturbing and ultimately compelling book. It shoves in your face everything you don't want to know about sex and disgust, desire and pain, love and violence. Helena's work has always been unsettling in its ability to tackle familiar pieties and to confront you with uncomfortable needs. Our refusals to see danger where it lies are deeply personal and protective, but Helena's book helped me to perceive the circumscription of my own thinking about love, sex and violence.