projects — DAISY LAFARGE

RADICAL PETS is an audio-novel co-authored by seven writers — NADIA DE VRIES, HABIB WILLIAM KHERBEK, DAISY LAFARGE, ELVIA WILK, TAYLOR LE MELLE, BECKET MWN, and MIA YOU — all of whom worked without conferring with each other, knowing only “the story so far” before beginning their chapters.
This approach was conceived in loose homage to L’HOMME QUI A PERDU SON SQUELETTE (1939), a collaborative novel written using the surrealist “exquisite corpse” technique, and reflects an interest in some questions around bodily proximity, interdependence and deviance that have lingered in the long shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen online at San Serriffe.

A pamphlet published to coincide with The Sick Rose, launched 19th January 2025. Featuring new and existing writing by Dom Hale, Gabriel Levine Brislin, Sarah McCormack, Kate Paul, Oisín Roberts, Akshi Singh and Jack Skelley.
Edition of 100; funds raised for the Poets’ Hardship Fund.

PDF available on request.

The Sick Rose presents a series of nine paintings made in 2024, and takes its title from William Blake’s 1794 poem of the same name. Fragments of domestic objects and pet portraits bloom into sick gardens and become swamped in recurring motifs of roses and insectile forms. The paintings are affixed with remnants of kinesiology tape used to support and compress unstable joints, and watercolour functions as a medium of pleasure, immediacy and minimal physical strain. Made during episodes of severe chronic pain, remote NHS chronic pain sessions and in phone queues and conversations with Social Security Scotland, the paintings came into existence as a way to steal something back from time spent trying to access unreliable and punitive forms of disability support. They are also an attempt to coexist with volatile physical and psychic states and to refigure pain as the ‘dark secret love’ of Blake’s poem.
Images available on request.

Watercolour paintings shown in ‘iNsEcurE’ at Glasgow Project Room, March - April 2024. Initiated by Aniara Omann, with Elísabet Brynhildardóttir, Clémentine Coupau, Che Go Eun and Soft Tissue.
Gansai Tambi watercolour, acid-free layout paper, kinesiology tape.
Review-essay by Maria Sledmere.
Discussed in 'Unlived Security’ by Akshi Singh.

Reading and live microscopy at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD. Featuring projections of local microbial samples, and a colony of Colpidium colpoda grown from decomposing Valentine’s Day roses.

Reading at MACBA, November 2023.
Ingela Ihrman, Daisy Lafarge, and Luz Pichel: Resonances in Nancy Holt
Six poem-essays on air translated into Catalan.

A collaboration with Brigid Elva, commissioned by Kelder Press.
Essay & illustrations responding to the theme of ‘In the Round’. Available to purchase here.

A collaboration with sound artist and composer Ludwig Berger, consisting of track titles for an album, Garden of Ediacara, forthcoming with -ous.

Poem/script commissioned for Pastoral Complex, a performance installation by Pa.LaC.E at La Becque, Switzerland.
Pastoral Complex is a drawing room reproducing the conditions of a single contour line on the sub-alpine peak Culan where there is 14.3% oxygen available. It is a test-site for gossiping in a suboptimal brain-state, with reduced performative capacity. The work learns from the short-lived movement in the 19th century of compressed 'air-bathing', echoing the days when urbanites sought “healthful” often alpine environments, particularly those in the vicinity of La Becque.

Quincunx: A work in progress for: breath work, looking, growing, eating, reading, weaving

With Rachel Pimm, Lilah Fowler, Holly Márie Parnell & Perian Gong.
Curated by curated by Junyao Chen, Jinghua Fan, Hetian Guo, Chao Liu, Si Shen, Costanza Simonini, Irina Sinenkaya and Jianan Wang; RCA Curating Contemporary Art MA.

Lockdown Commission, University of Edinburgh Art Collection
Written between May and July 2020, Five Tongues takes its title from the name for the common weed green alkanet, Pentaglottis sempervirens.
It is part lockdown diary & part series of anecdotes on botany, taxonomy, colour, amateur microscopy, symbiogenesis & botanical solfège by way of Jamaica Kincaid & Linnaeus, among others.
Double-sided risograph printed in an edition of 100; copies were sold to raise funds for Black Minds Matter UK and Ubuntu Womens Shelter.
Please get in touch if you would like to read the digital version.

Short film essay commissioned for The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory at The Serpentine.
‘we eat each other up’ considers the various appetites of Simone Weil, Schistosoma flatworms, Aristophanes’ conjoined lovers and the cannibalistic origins of meiotic sex.

A collaborative serial fiction project for MAP Magazine following the exploits of Colin Clout—a sixteenth century persona of dissent, here reimagined as art critic.
Concieved & edited by Daisy Lafarge with contributions from William Kherbek, Eley Williams, Susan Finlay, Suzanne van der Lingen, Sarah Tripp & Simon Buckley, Khairani Barokka, Jeremy Millar, Alberta Whittle and Sophie Collins. Design & illustration by Jame St Finlay.
Chapters online and in print at MAP.

Speculative fiction exploring the colonial history of plant-hunting and the amassing of botanical specimens. Filmed in the glasshouses of Glasgow and Edinburgh’s botanical gardens.
Exhibitions and screenings include Talbot Rice Gallery, Scottish Sculpture Studios and Tate St Ives.
It was acquired by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection in 2016, awarded the John Watson Art Prize and selected for RSA New Contemporaries 2017.